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

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I thought that the sas connection that goes to the raid card is suppose to be slot one... looks like you have it on 6
 
As long as you plug in the power cable.

He has it in both ports 1 and 6.

His raid card only supports 1 cable though.

And this also means 4 drive bays aren't plugged in.
 
i have an sff-8087 to sff-8088 pci bracket coming from ebay, also i bought another sff-8087 to 4 sata cable so i have the option of running 20 drives for now and the option for saisy chaining 2 cases.

speaking of which how do you turn on the psu in the second case when you daisy chain??
 
Paperclip :D

You just need to connect 2 pins in the ATX-connector, the one for psu on (green wire iirc) and ground (black), there are also plugs connecting these pins, usually found along watercooling stuff to power the pump without a running pc. So the psu will turn on as power is plugged in.
Just as the most basic solution...
 
Master_shake_ said:
i have an sff-8087 to sff-8088 pci bracket coming from ebay, also i bought another sff-8087 to 4 sata cable so i have the option of running 20 drives for now and the option for saisy chaining 2 cases.

speaking of which how do you turn on the psu in the second case when you daisy chain??
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If you want to do it yourself, you can find the howto here http://www.directron.com/2powersupplies.html#atxauto and if you just want to buy the harness you can find it here http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1698/1/
 
patrickdk said:
As long as you plug in the power cable.

He has it in both ports 1 and 6.

His raid card only supports 1 cable though.

And this also means 4 drive bays aren't plugged in.
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Gotcha....after retracing I see where slot one cable ends up.
 
^^ finally figured out what was missing,

Didn't see that you were missing the raid card, it "appeared" that you only were using the expander card, HOWEVER the expander card connects to the raid card :0

So how many hdd's do you have now ?
 
aren't you a little bit afraid to run 20x r6?
id be terrified to run that many drives in single volume that has smth else the just media onboard
 
im pretty sure that if i keep a couple of rives on hand i shouldnt be in trouble, however this raid card has the abilit to run a raid 60 so i should have options in the future.
 
I'm somewhat surprised that with large numbers of drives, people don't seem to be guarding against container / backplane failure. For instance if you have 3 backplanes each of 4 drives, you could RAID 5 with one drive on each backplane, then stripe across for a RAID 50. Then not only would you be protected for one drive per RAID 5 segment, but you'd also be protected if one whole backplane failed. I've seen this done with backplanes that are a full rack-width. If you had 4+ backplanes, you could use RAID 60
 
Quartz-1 said:
I'm somewhat surprised that with large numbers of drives, people don't seem to be guarding against container / backplane failure. For instance if you have 3 backplanes each of 4 drives, you could RAID 5 with one drive on each backplane, then stripe across for a RAID 50. Then not only would you be protected for one drive per RAID 5 segment, but you'd also be protected if one whole backplane failed. I've seen this done with backplanes that are a full rack-width. If you had 4+ backplanes, you could use RAID 60
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How often does a backplain failure also destroy the drives?
 
houkouonchi said:
How often does a backplain failure also destroy the drives?
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Seldom, but a backplane failure will remove a group of drives all at once. Which would make your storage unavailable. Effectively you're RAIDing the backplanes.
 
that would probably be a worst case scenario, but it could happen. i think if you run a raid sixty vertically not horizontally you'd be ok.

Example

1 1 0 0
0 0 1 1
1 1 0 0
0 0 1 1
1 1 0 0

in my case, i could lose an entire back plane and still be ok.
 
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Quartz-1 said:
Seldom, but a backplane failure will remove a group of drives all at once. Which would make your storage unavailable. Effectively you're RAIDing the backplanes.
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The drive just going offline is extremely easy to fix on areca controllers. I have external storage which is not on a UPS sot he computer was still running and all 30 disks went offline at once and it came back up without me doing anything but even if it didn't automatically come back up its still an easy situation to recover from.
 
houkouonchi said:
The drive just going offline is extremely easy to fix on areca controllers. I have external storage which is not on a UPS sot he computer was still running and all 30 disks went offline at once and it came back up without me doing anything but even if it didn't automatically come back up its still an easy situation to recover from.
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But suppose you had 3 banks of 10 and 1 bank - 10 disks - went off line but not the rest. One failure has cost you 10 disks.
 
Quartz-1 said:
But suppose you had 3 banks of 10 and 1 bank - 10 disks - went off line but not the rest. One failure has cost you 10 disks.
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Not really sure why the fearmongering with a failed backplane. 1) how often does a backplane going out actually kill drives? Never heard of it do that 2) unless you are using an extremely cheap RAID card they can handle losing several drives just fine as long as they dont actually fail. Similar to an earlier poster Ive had an issue where I accidentally unplugged several drives power from an array and I didnt notice until I booted the machine and RAID came up as 'unavailable' I powered off the machine, reconnected the drives (3 of them in a RAID 5) and the controller saw them, saw they were part of the array, spent an hour or two verifying parity and the array was good as new so even if I had lost a backplane the result would have been the same. and last and most important. RAID is never, and will never be a replacement for actual backups. Data stored on an array should simply be the live copy, not the only copy because RAID is not a backup its just for redundancy and performance.
 
Did a bit of a changeover tonight, got rid of the cheapo Thermaltake Armor case I picked up and went to a bitfenix shinobi case.

Wanted to make it look a bit nicer seeing as it now sits next to my TV for use as a media-server type thing, downsizing it from 40TB to 26TB and moving some drives to another PC.

Pic 1

Pic 2

Specs remain pretty much similar though

AMD X6 1055T
Kingston HyperX 8GB DDR3
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3
IBM M1015
Lsi 4 Port SCSI/SATA
HP Quad Gigabit / Dell XR997 10Gbe (Depending if a LAN is on)
*4 WD EZRX 3TB Raid0
*8 2TB (3x 2*2TB Raid0, 2TB Partitioned OS, 2TB JBOD)
Coolermaster 650w
Bitfenix Shinobi Case and fans.
 
@jacobt844, very nice looking, reminds me I need to do some more cable cleanup on mine still haha, swapped out some hardware in it (video and NIC) and its now an utter mess again xD

What OS/filesystem are you running on that again?
 
[OC]Pik4chu;1038687256 said:
Not really sure why the fearmongering with a failed backplane. 1) how often does a backplane going out actually kill drives?
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The issue is not drives being killed but loss of availability. How quickly can you replace a failed backplane? That's why you have RAID in the first place. Typical PC RAID backplanes fit 4x 3.5" drives, and the server which prompted my post had 3 of those. Lose one of those backplanes and you've lost one set of drives until you replace the backplane. I've seen them go die due to power surges, static, and whatnot. So, unless you RAID the backplanes, you've lost the whole array if your generated drive spans backplanes. So you should consider guarding against it.

Consider 3x 4-drive backplanes, A, B, and C each with 4 drives 1-4:

A 1 2 3 4
B 1 2 3 4
C 1 2 3 4

Now, if you make a RAID 5 out of each '1' (A1, B1, C1) drive, a RAID 5 out of each '2' drive etc, then stripe them across, you are resilient not only to a single drive failure, but to failure of A, B, or C while still maintaining your single volume.

Now consider a rack-mounted system where you have 8 backplanes, each with 12x 4TB drives, with vertical RAID 6 and striped across for 576 TB available. You have something that's highly resilient to drive failure and also resilient to backplane failure. If you don't, your users are likely to be very annoyed at the loss of service.

RAID is never, and will never be a replacement for actual backups. Data stored on an array should simply be the live copy, not the only copy because RAID is not a backup its just for redundancy and performance.
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Agreed absolutely.
 
There is 1 downside to the whole vertical RAID story though. Say 1 drive fails and you replace it, a rebuild will begin. The rebuild WILL go over all backplanes and might (in some occasions) affect performance. God forbid that a second disk fails in another vertical array. then you have 2 parity rebuilds going on over all backplanes which will affect performance.

The question is, will you notice it? Answer: depends.

Multiple drive failures are not that special in big DIY arrays since we have the tendancy to buy a lot of disks of the same type at the same time. This puts them next to eachother in terms of MTBF.

It'll probably be more of a concern to only a few who push their big DIY to the limit AND need to service users, but it's food for thoughts.
 
Amount of storage in the following system 13TB (12TB Thunderbolt External / 1TB iMac Internal)


Case - 2011 iMac
CPU - i7 3.4GHz
RAM - 32GB G Skill
GPU - ATi 6970 2GB
Optical Drives - Apple Superdrive
Hard Drives - 4 x HUA72303 3TB Hard Drives
Operating System - Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3

(I use my system for my Photography hobby, as well as my wife's Special Education Portfolio videos. Also, I back everything up daily. Lost 2tb of data a few months back, and cannot do that again.)

Desktop.jpg

21b5c495.jpg

51d9fd35.jpg
 
yes. moar pics less talk..

8 x 2TB preflood F4's in a Lian Li PC-Q25 (plus 60gb ssd boot) gonna double up as soon as 4tb's drop.

jammed an 8th hdd with the help of brackets. the p/s was a little long so I added the extender, since it was cheaper than buying a new p/s.

P5082602.JPG


P5082603.JPG


P5082610.JPG
 
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Had this running for almost a year now. Just upgraded the processor. Used primarily for my movies to stream movies to my HTPC's or to upload movies to my tablet or phone for on the go.
Intel i5 3450
Gigabyte GA-H67MA-USB3
8GB ram corsair
Intel Nic
SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8
Seasonic X650
2TB Samsung F4 x 4
3TB Hitachi X 4
1TB Samsung F3 x 1
500gb western digial x 1
WHS 2011


IMAG0531.jpg

IMAG0473.jpg
 
Shoop said:
Had this running for almost a year now. Just upgraded the processor. Used primarily for my movies to stream movies to my HTPC's or to upload movies to my tablet or phone for on the go.
Intel i5 3450
Gigabyte GA-H67MA-USB3
8GB ram corsair
Intel Nic
SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8
Seasonic X650
2TB Samsung F4 x 4
3TB Hitachi X 4
1TB Samsung F3 x 1
500gb western digial x 1
WHS 2011
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Can I ask why you bothered upgrading the processor when all it's doing is file serving? Is WHS really demanding? :confused:
 
It was upgraded mostly because I use My Movies plug in. I have all my blu rays ripped to the server then I have it convert them to an MP4 so I can upload the movies to my tablet. The mp4 conversions were taking 2 to 3 hours. With the new processor it takes about 45 mins.
 
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