The [H]ard Forum Storage Showoff Thread - Post your 10TB+ systems

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Blue Fox said:
You don't buy a $1000 RAID card if you aren't going to use RAID levels with parity.
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Right, to rephrase I meant I don't intend to parity all of them, but I may pair up 2 of them, etc.

Ockie said:
I was going to buy it simply to JBOD for WHS.. I wanted something with a lot of ports in a single slot :D
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My main problem is that it has to be a SINGLE slot, All other ports have graphics cards, X_X. So I am in the same boat.

jtg1993 said:
I found a card with 16 ports but no hardware raid for half the price of the Areca. Im pretty sure its supported on Solaris. Newegg Link
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Thats nice, but I definitely want HARDWARE raid heh :).

Motherboards that have the ICH or Marvell controllers etc? Those are hardware or software raid? Can someone explain exactly ?

But yea I need something that takes 10 HDDs, has at Raid 0, and Raid 1, good performance, enough if I ever go insane and get 10 SSD's and Raid 0 all of them, hehe that would be usable. Thats the idea heh!

If anyone has a cheaper solution though I am all ears :).

OS: Vista64/Windows 7 and Ubuntu, No Solaris, sorry, never played with it, though should I? ;)
 
jtg1993 said:
I found a card with 16 ports but no hardware raid for half the price of the Areca. Im pretty sure its supported on Solaris. Newegg Link
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That's the same card I have! I love it! Awesome price and an awesome card. What's this about no hardware raid? It's supported fully, it just lacks the onboard cache.
 
n1ce_hat said:
That's the same card I have! I love it! Awesome price and an awesome card. What's this about no hardware raid? It's supported fully, it just lacks the onboard cache.
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None of the Highpoint 2000 series cards are hardware RAID cards. You have to move up to the 3000 or 4000 series for hardware RAID from Highpoint.
 
n1ce_hat said:
What's this about no hardware raid?
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That highpoint card still uses the CPU to do all of parity calculations for a RAID setup. As such, it is not a true hardware RAID card as those cards will have an onboard CPU specifically dedicated/designed to handle all of the parity calculations for a RAID setup.

As Volkum said, Highpoint's 3000 series and above are true hardware RAID controllers. The 2000 series and below are just fakeRAID or software RAID based.
 
Highpoint is like the rocketfish of raid.

They are the bare bottom of hardware/software controllers. If you see similarly priced controllers do not go for the highpoint.

For many highpoint was like training wheels. Mine being the Rocketraid 404. This beast supported Raid 5 for IDE. It was supported in Linux through some module hackery and it worked. I later learned that it was softraid and moved on. It was buggy as hell and left a sour taste in my mouth.

3Ware for a time was known as the linuxman's hardware raid controller. They have/had amazing kernel support. At some point Areca came along and offered the same offerings as 3ware in the SATA market.

Highpoint still provides raid cards for SATA...:

The old school raid controller manufacturers are still LSI and Adaptec.

Ok, so I digress to somepoint:

In the consumer (RAID) market the best bang for your buck is the Perc 5i/6i. These are best obtained through auction sites, the 6i preferred due to recent PCI-X/PCI-E clarification.

The supermicro AOC-USAS-L4i/AOC-SAT2-MV8 are best for the WHS market.

Seriously, go with one of he above cards for a WHS build.
 
Should be easy to get this number with the 2tb drives around. I just picked up 5 of them, did a Raid 5 using 4 drives, and gave one away to a buddy. I'm sure we'll see more of the 2tb's out soon.
 
Lol, should have posted in here when I worked at my last job. I put together 48TB of storage over 2 years.
 
dhahlen said:
Should be easy to get this number with the 2tb drives around. I just picked up 5 of them, did a Raid 5 using 4 drives, and gave one away to a buddy. I'm sure we'll see more of the 2tb's out soon.
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I hope for cheap, too. I'd love for these drives to hit around $175. :)
 
I only purchased them because a friend got me a killer price on them. I'm thinking about doing some similar setups, perhaps a supermicro enclosure with a raid sas/sata card. I'll really tempted to drop a nice chunk on getting a storage server which I won't need to upgrade for a few years.

I like a lot of these setups, I'll have my 5.4TB full in no time. maybe if I stop being lazy, I can post the rest of my setup and join the 10tb club =P
 
i just built my first 10Tb system and thought it was a monster, but some of you are really dedicated to this cause

much props, there's some really nice equipment in this thread :D
 
geiger said:
Highpoint is like the rocketfish of raid.

They are the bare bottom of hardware/software controllers. If you see similarly priced controllers do not go for the highpoint.

For many highpoint was like training wheels. Mine being the Rocketraid 404. This beast supported Raid 5 for IDE. It was supported in Linux through some module hackery and it worked. I later learned that it was softraid and moved on. It was buggy as hell and left a sour taste in my mouth.
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Have you used their current gen of hardware cards? The 3000/4000 series cards are actually quite good on a price/performance level. The hardware is pretty much the same as the high end Areca/Adaptec cards. I can't comment on the "quality" of their driver code as I'm anything but a driver developer, but they also do have open source drivers for Linux as well as drivers in the upstream kernels which compile and function without any issues (which is more than I can say about Adaptec's open source driver package--stick to the in kernel drivers).

While not the most popular producer of RAID cards, I wouldn't say they're bad in the sense of bare bottom (I assume you meant bottom of the barrel...). Maybe you just have bad stigma about them from an experience many years ago?
 
Can't speak to the cards, but I picked up some of their breakout cables for my SM SAS card and I'm loving them so far. It's nice to have good wrapped cables vs those flat hard red ones everyone else uses. I'm curious to see if they suffer from a shielding problem - but they are great to work with (if a bit long).
 
Just ordered an additional 8 Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB drives, so now my system qualifies. Old config in my sig. Pics as soon as the parts arrive and are installed.

14.5TB advertised capacity

Lian-Li V2000B Case
Asus P5K Pro
Intel Core2Quad Q6600
8GB G.Skill DDR2/800
Corsair 650TX Power Suply
Two Dell Perc5/i RAID controllers
Windows Server 2003 R2 Std x64 with Unified Data Storage Serve 2003 iSCSI components installed

OS (Software RAID 1)
2 x Seagate 7200.10 250GB

VDMK Storage (RAID 10)
3 x Seagate 7200.11 500GB
1 WD Caviar Black 500GB

Media Storage (RAID 5)
2 x Seagate 7200.11 1TB
10 x WD Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB

I've been replacing the Seagate 7200.11 drives with WD Caviar Blacks as they fail. So far I've had two 1TB and one 500GB Seagate drives fail. I'm presenting the storage as iSCSI targets to my ESX 3.5 hosts. For the Media LUN I have a VM with a second NIC on the iSCSI network and installed the Microsoft iSCSI initiator. That VM connects directly to the Media Storage LUN to get around the 2TB per LUN limit in ESX 3.5.
 
geiger said:
The supermicro AOC-USAS-L4i/AOC-SAT2-MV8 are best for the WHS market.
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Could you tell me if it is possible to enable onboard sata controller and Supermicro controller at the same time? If so then I would have 6 + 8 ports. :)
 
bitbum said:
Could you tell me if it is possible to enable onboard sata controller and Supermicro controller at the same time? If so then I would have 6 + 8 ports. :)
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Yes. I have it that way on my WHS setup.
 
drgnfang said:
Can't speak to the cards, but I picked up some of their breakout cables for my SM SAS card and I'm loving them so far. It's nice to have good wrapped cables vs those flat hard red ones everyone else uses. I'm curious to see if they suffer from a shielding problem - but they are great to work with (if a bit long).
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Linkage?
 
Amount of total storage- Advertised: 26.3TB Actual: 20.28TB
Amount of storage in the following system- Advertised: 24.3TB Actual: 18.46TB
(I'm only listing this difference as 2tb of my storage is an external backup target that is kept offsite, though I do consider it part of my server)

Case: Norco 4020
PSU: Corsair 750w
Motherboard: Gigabyte 790GX
CPU: AMD 4050e
RAM: 4gb (2x2) Patriot 6400
Optical Drives: Slim DVD RW
Controller Cards: 2x Areca ARC-1230
Hard Drives: 300gb WD Velociraptor (OS), 12x WD 2tb Green (two 6 disk raid 5 arrays for data) - will be expanding the arrays as needed
Operating System: WHS

I've recently gotten into digitally storing my movie collection so I decided to put together a media server. I started off with about 800 SD dvds that I had but soon realized that I could begin storing BD content as well. Currently have 200 BD movies that I am converting into more reasonable file sizes and adding to the server. Chose to go with hardware raid for this project since ripping and converting both SD and BD media is quite the project and after all the work I have put in thus far, I would jump out a window before I re-ripped the media I have on the server now.

System pimarily operates as a media server, serving up 1080p video to a PS3 and 2 popcorn hours as well as music and photos to me and my wife's client pcs.
The server also servers as central file storage for me since I'm back and forth between my desktop and laptop so often. Of course I'm also using the WHS functions to backup our 2 desktops and 3 laptops.

I currently have a 2tb drive in an external enclosure for backing up our family photos, important documents etc. This drive is kept offsite.

Here's pics of the server:

DSC00477.jpg


[
DSC00479.jpg


And the WHS console:

svr02.jpg


svr01.jpg


And one of the workspace: (I run a 3 monitor setup, so I can swivel one around when I need to do server maintenence)

DSC00485.jpg
 
Nice, i love my 3007. I should have snagged that U2UFO case when I saw it for sale several months ago on [H]. Looks pretty badass
 
Yeah, but I have yet to find .5 meter cables that aren't of the "hard, flat, PITA to work with" variety. If you know of some let me know and I'll pick them up when I get the second card (cause I really don't want 4 sets of 1 meter long cables in this thing).
 
sonofander - I LOL'd here at work and people looked at me funnay when I saw that GIANT cube case on top of your desk. Makes the Norco look tame.

Very nice setup!
 
[LYL]Homer;1034219281 said:
sonofander - I LOL'd here at work and people looked at me funnay when I saw that GIANT cube case on top of your desk. Makes the Norco look tame.

Very nice setup!
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Cube cases tend to have that effect...

Always wanted one, but I don't know where I'd put it.
 
thebeephaha said:
Cube cases tend to have that effect...

Always wanted one, but I don't know where I'd put it.
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They are hard to work with especially for transportation.... and if they have wheels that makes it even more of a task.
 
OK, some changes to my upgrade plans. I received the 8 WD Caviar Black 1TB drives and a couple of Icy Dock screwless backplanes. Unfortunately as I suspected I cannot span an array across two Dell Perc5 controllers. Rather than deal with two RAID5 arrays for my media storage I've decided to change out controllers. The new setup:

1 Adaptec 5805 Controller
1 Chenbro CK13601 36port SAS Expander
14 1TB Drives in RAID 6 (Media)
4 500GB Drives in RAID 10 (VMWare Storage)
2 250GB drives in RAID 1 (OS)

All parts are on order now. The Chenbro is a special order part though so looks like I might be waiting a while for that.
 
Here's a rough picture but inside that antec 300 i have 8x1.5TB samsungs in raid6 and a 1TB F1 for ubuntu.

in my Lian-Li PC-60FB next to it i have a measly 2x640GB WD.
on top of the cases i have another 640GB WD, 2x1.5TB samsungs, and 3x1TB F1s

for a grand total of 20.92TB :)

100_4881_small.jpg
 
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Ockie will love this. Only the drives and RAID cards for now. It's 40 1.5TB 7200.11 drives and 2 Areca 1680D-IX-24 with 4GB cache. Will bring total space to 80TB advertised.

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You're going to have lots of issues with those drives on the SAS Areca controllers unfortunately.
 
Sending back the 1680's and getting 2 1280ML's then. I've got a 1261ML and have never had a problem with it.
 
LittleMe said:
Sending back the 1680's and getting 2 1280ML's then. I've got a 1261ML and have never had a problem with it.
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Yeah, they work fine. It's just the SAS controllers that are rather picky. I still want to get a 1680ix-24 for SAS expander support though. I need to sell my 1280ML first however.
 
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