Direct Attached Storage / Expander?

D

DD_nVidia

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 15, 2009
Messages
177
What I was considering was a Norco 4220 (the X-Case.co.uk branded version) and lobbing my Core 2 Duo system in there and chuck a PCI video card in and a PCI-E Raid card and some PCI-E 1x cards with sata ports if needed in the future (ontop of the boards 6)

Now, what I wanted to do was hook this up to my Core i7 Rig (which I'd put in another rack mount case just above it) But what would be the best way of doing this? Speed is definately an issue, I really need it to be just as fast as if the drives were in the system for my editing and scrolling through large libraries of photos.

I thought about just using a SAS expander. and not putting a system in it at all, but in which case what would be the best thing to get for that?

I also considered ethernet teaming, but for quad teaming (4x1Gbit) it'd need the pci-e 16x slot for the 4x card so it'd mean a new motherboard for that if it even worked.
 
depends how many drives you need
how about the same norco case?
4p sas card, sas expander, jbod supermicro board for case
if going for lets say 10 drives, 2x esata with 5p multipliers comes in mind
even if going for 20, two 2p esata cards on pcie x1, four esata cables, 5p multipliers with pci brackets, jbod board for case
 
I'll have 8 Drives in it from the get go. more as I go on.

I eventually want a RAID 5 for my photos, a mirror for downloads, and a mirror for music/podcasts + 2 drives for system backups, one always in the rack, one removed.

So at least 10 Drives in the next 2-3 months.

I've never seen these expanders or the kind of setup your describing. or a JBOD board. (although I do know some of the things exist) I'm just finding it a little hard to visualise.

Thank you though.
 
Teaming only speeds up multiple connections, so (for example) copying a single large file only goes at a maximum speed of 1 gigabit.

A JBOD board is basically a minimal motherboard: it takes a 24-pin ATX connector, and sends the power supply the right signals to turn it on. They've also got connectors for system fans and so forth.

A SAS expander is a board (usually in PCI-type slot form factor) that has an internal or external connection which a controller plugs in to, and several other ports that drives plug in to. Think of it as a switch for Ethernet.
 
asgards - Thanks mate I think I have an idea of what its supposed to be like now.

unhappy_mage - Wouldn't it split the packets up and just send them concurently and patch them back together agian at the other end? Also yeah I think I get what the JBOD board is. So I'd need one of those along with a SAS expander.

CASE 1 - Core i7 RIG - SAS card -> CASE 2 - JBOD Board - SAS Expander

SAS Expander - mini sas -> backplane mini sas.

So I'd have a full 3Gbit SAS connection to the drives.

Right now I have a Dell Perc5/i SAS card http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2584/3830236955_b864815f93.jpg and my board has 2 sas ports but they are obviously no help. So what kit do you think I should get because I've not got much of a clue when it comes to this sort of stuff, its all pretty new. (preferably fairly cheap. around £100-200 total? if thats possible)
 
I recommend you don't go the SAS expander route. It will cause you nothing but headaches, and they aren't cheap. A SAS expander is going to run you about $350 if you can even find one for sale (well, you can, they'll just take a month to ship). Add another $300 at least for a HBA (or RAID card) that supports the expander and well, it gets expensive.
 
So what would your suggestion be then?

I need the data accessable just as fast as it were in my system. 10Gbit with iSCSI would be perfect if NIC's were under £100 each, but they arnt :(
 
Price = performance unfortunately. If you want a 10gbit interface, you can always pick up InfiniBand adapters off eBay, but once again, you get what you pay for (they are cheap though). You're going to have to pick between price and performance...that's just how it works. Do you even have a managed switch to accommodate 802.3ad for the multiple NICs you plan on using?
 
Well I wasnt sure if I'd just be able to go computer to computer and leave out the switch... if it was just for one computer.
 
I'm not sure if you can do link aggregation directly between one computer and another like that.
 
Not that it matters either way, 2 NICs are just way to expensive and direct quad teaming (intel quad gbit nics for both computers) is the only way I can see doing it over cat6 and at around £100 a card its "Reasonably" cheap, but then again, i loose my pci-e 16x slot for the 4x card onm my P5B-E and a 16x slot on my P6TWSPro.

I'm almost certain I'll have to go the SAS expander route if I use it for storing my photos.

I'm considering just hooking it up a decent pci / pci-1x with gigabit ethernet nic, and just keeping my movies, music, and general photos and JPG exports on, and perhaps for archiving RAW files in a 6 or 12 month cycle.
 
How much space do you even need? To be honest, you're probably blowing the speed thing out of proportion anyway. Do you really need more than 100mb/s for editing photos? I think you're also forgetting how difficult it is going to be to find a SAS expander (outside of a chassis). It's hard enough over here, but across the pond, even more so. Also, if you're having a hard time spending the money on two decent NICs, how is spending $750+ on a SAS expander and HBA going to be any easier? Like I warned you before, even if you do come across a SAS expander, it will cause you nothing but headaches.
 
Well in my system just now im rocking 5TB + my 4 SAS 15K drives. across a total of 10 Drives, Plus I have 2 x 250GB externals.

My photos are 35-50MB each in RAW, 140MB in 16bit TIFF format.

I've got just over 3-3.5TB used just now. Although only around 1.5-1.75TB of that is actual data, the rest is a backup. (daily incrmental backups @ 3am, atm although I will eventually have a better backup stratagy)

And holy cow £500 (give or take) =/ arh I wasn't wanting to spend that, I was hoping no more than £500 overall!

Maybe I'll just shove the i7 in the Norco case and do it all from that. Thing is however I'm wanting to shove a Fermi based GPU, not the HIGHEST end one, but certainly in the high end catagory (think 5850 instead of 5870) so I was worried about having all those drives so dense together, especially when the drive numbers go up, the temps might get a bit crazy...

My main thing was to try and keep the Data seperated hardware wise from the system, so that replacing an entire system, or adding new ones wouldnt mean messing around with the data. To much of an Idealist/Dreamer i guess haha.
 
DD_nVidia said:
My main thing was to try and keep the Data seperated hardware wise from the system, so that replacing an entire system, or adding new ones wouldnt mean messing around with the data. To much of an Idealist/Dreamer i guess haha.
Click to expand...

The issue with wanting that is the fact that those setups normally involve enterprise level hardware, with enterprise level pricing :( I feel your pain because I have been looking for something similar myself for some time now.
 
I would recommend a Silicon image Sil3132 based PCI-E x1 card, with a pair SiI3726 base 5 port multiplier from CFI Group (model number:CFI-B53PM). Both can be had for around 40 dollars (you need to order the multiplier from CFI Group directly. Isn't difficult.. might be closer to 50 each with small orders).

That will give you up to 10 hard drives on a single RAID Card
 
Neb - Yeah man. I know a guy who gets some stuff when his company is throwing stuff out, thats how I got my SAS drives and dell card, they were opting for some SSD's and bigger SAS drives. (enterprise level, not the ones we'd buy) So he made sure they went to a good home. I'll give him a call tomorrow, see what he can get his hands on.

jrdonnaruma - Well you see I want hardware level RAID 5 for my Photos, and I want as much speed as humanly possible for that. Storage for my downloads and media only needs to be fast enough to stream 1080p which I'm sure that card would be able to do. I'd be happy with 2 software raid 1's for each of those.

I'll draw a little diagram out on paper later on today, but I'm thinking the concencus is that I'm not gonna be using it a DAS for my photo library. Bummer.
 
I used to work with some Dell Powervault MD3000's and they were great. SAS card connection to the DAS, configuration to how you like it...etc etc. Shame they cost $8k :(

edit: well it looks like you can get some around $3k used on ebay...but that's still $$$
 
DD_nVidia said:
Neb - Yeah man. I know a guy who gets some stuff when his company is throwing stuff out, thats how I got my SAS drives and dell card, they were opting for some SSD's and bigger SAS drives. (enterprise level, not the ones we'd buy) So he made sure they went to a good home. I'll give him a call tomorrow, see what he can get his hands on.

jrdonnaruma - Well you see I want hardware level RAID 5 for my Photos, and I want as much speed as humanly possible for that. Storage for my downloads and media only needs to be fast enough to stream 1080p which I'm sure that card would be able to do. I'd be happy with 2 software raid 1's for each of those.

I'll draw a little diagram out on paper later on today, but I'm thinking the concencus is that I'm not gonna be using it a DAS for my photo library. Bummer.
Click to expand...

Why not just use flexRAID ontop of the OS with 1 or 2 parity drives? Gives you 2 drives you can lose, then you dont lose the entire array if another drive goes, just the data on the drive that died. (think WHS)
 
DD_nVidia said:
unhappy_mage - Wouldn't it split the packets up and just send them concurently and patch them back together agian at the other end?
Click to expand...
No, it doesn't. Read the IEEE spec if you have access to it, or see Syskonnect's take on 802.3ad:
When applying WAN technologies, frames are sometimes broken into smaller units to accel-
erate transmission (such as in the bonding of B-channel ISDN lines). LAN communications
channels, however, do not support sub-frame transfers. The complete frame has to be sent
through the same physical link. Using aggregated links, the task is to select the link on which
to transmit a given frame. Sending one long frame may take longer than sending several
short ones, so the short frames may be received earlier than one long frame. The order has
to be restored at the receiver side. Thus, an agreement has been made: all frames belonging
to one conversation must be transmitted through the same physical link, which guarantees
correct ordering at the receiving end station. For this reason no sequencing information may
be added to the frames. Traffic belonging to separate conversations can be sent through
various links in a random order. The algorithm for assigning frames to a conversation de-
pends on the application environment and the kind of devices used at each end of the link.
Click to expand...

Blue Fox said:
I recommend you don't go the SAS expander route. It will cause you nothing but headaches, and they aren't cheap. A SAS expander is going to run you about $350 if you can even find one for sale (well, you can, they'll just take a month to ship). Add another $300 at least for a HBA (or RAID card) that supports the expander and well, it gets expensive.
Click to expand...
If you don't mind using an x8 slot for the expander itself, you can use a HP expander. Then add an LSI controller (occasionally very cheap on eBay; I'm using a 3442E-R that I got for $90) and the proper cable (probably about $20) and you're all set. The major downside is that, as mentioned, you end up using two wide pci-e slots, possibly in the same motherboard.

Other alternatives are the Chenbro CK13601, which is apparently out of production (and very hard to find---make sure it's in stock before giving them money!).
Blue Fox said:
To be honest, you're probably blowing the speed thing out of proportion anyway. Do you really need more than 100mb/s for editing photos?
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I agree. If you get your stuff set up properly, it'll push 100 MB/s over a single Ethernet cable. That's fast enough to load or save one of your photos in a second. If you need much more than that, consider putting a fast disk or array in your editing computer, and saving the final result to the network, instead of trying to do everything over network.
Blue Fox said:
Also, if you're having a hard time spending the money on two decent NICs, how is spending $750+ on a SAS expander and HBA going to be any easier?
Click to expand...
I put together my SAS expander setup for $430: $340 shipped for the HP expander, and $90 shipped for the LSI card to drive it.
Blue Fox said:
Like I warned you before, even if you do come across a SAS expander, it will cause you nothing but headaches.
Click to expand...
What makes you say that? Mine has been nothing less of straightforward: plug in cables, it works. I had a similar experience at work.
jrdonnaruma said:
I would recommend a Silicon image Sil3132 based PCI-E x1 card, with a pair SiI3726 base 5 port multiplier from CFI Group (model number:CFI-B53PM). Both can be had for around 40 dollars (you need to order the multiplier from CFI Group directly. Isn't difficult.. might be closer to 50 each with small orders).
Click to expand...
I've heard bad things about port multipliers, although I admit I haven't played with one myself. I'd recommend looking for another solution.
 
unhappy_mage said:
I've heard bad things about port multipliers, although I admit I haven't played with one myself. I'd recommend looking for another solution.
Click to expand...

Just curious (as in, not picking a fight), but why would you recommend against something you have no experience with? I personally have build solid configurations for clients using that setup with flexRAID, with no problems what-so-ever. I wouldn't have recommended it otherwise.

I also know of a major internet file storage company that uses this similar type of setup for their storage pods (they use 4 controllers and 9 multipliers in every box. actually, those exact multipliers) The company is black blaze. They can be made to work well, if you use controllers from Silicon Image. Those are the only ones I have tested to work well.
 
jrdonnaruma said:
Just curious (as in, not picking a fight), but why would you recommend against something you have no experience with? I personally have build solid configurations for clients using that setup with flexRAID, with no problems what-so-ever. I wouldn't have recommended it otherwise.
Click to expand...
I wasn't recommending agains flexRAID (although I'd probably lean more in that direction if my opinion were asked). I was recommending against port multipliers in a want-speed context. My understanding is that most port multipliers don't interleave traffic to different disks*: if you ask for 1MB to be sent to disk A and a different 1MB to be sent to disk B at the same time, the PM sends 1MB to A and then 1MB to B. This might sound like a logical strategy, but the problem is that the instructions to B don't arrive for at least 1/300th of a second. This adds about 0.3 milliseconds to these accesses, which could slow things down overall.

* That is, most PMs implement command-based rather than FIS-based switching.
jrdonnaruma said:
I also know of a major internet file storage company that uses this similar type of setup for their storage pods (they use 4 controllers and 9 multipliers in every box. actually, those exact multipliers) The company is black blaze. They can be made to work well, if you use controllers from Silicon Image. Those are the only ones I have tested to work well.
Click to expand...
Yes, BlackBlaze does use these port multipliers with carefully chosen hardware and software, in hugely redundant configurations, to write a few megabytes per second. OP is trying to buy one set of hardware, in raid 1 with all the disks going through the same kind of PMs, to write a few hundred megabytes per second. They're different use cases, and demand different solutions.

For what it's worth, I use a service like BlackBlaze (specifically, Crashplan, because they'll back up >4GB files) and have no regrets about using storage of that sort in the appropriate situation. I just don't think this is it.
 
unhappy_mage -

ah right well, bollocks haha, I'll not be doing that then XD

Well what I was wanting ideally was the data seperated from the system, but I still wanted to connect the data to any system as if they were connected internally in terms of speed (and preferably latency too)

I am a little confused by that expander, it has a pci-e slot on it but if that was in the oter case what would it plug into... My core 2 duo rigs pci-e? With a SAS Raid card with an external port plugging into my Core i7 rigs pci-e? then linking the 2 systems together with the correct cable????? (different cases is pretty much when I'm trying to do, 20 drives plus a Core i7 oc'd + a Fermi based GPU in one case is gonna scream trouble)

100MB/s is enough to put one or two yeah, but in Adobe Lightroom I'll generally have 40-60 thumbnails open if not more if they are constantly on the second screen but i'm sure for preview/cache files I'll store them on a 15k drive locally. but I often jump into develop mode which then takes the RAW file and converts it to an image on the fly which already really taxes my i7. but i'll hop hop hop in develop mode usually between images so I'm not sure if just now its the hard drives stopping it from going any faster or the cpu not being able to render any faster. (I'm using Samsung 1TB F3's atm) I'll try and have a look in the performance monitor next time im editing.

Also the way lightroom works you use catalogs and they store and orgonise the photos, so trying to split photos out of catalogs into other ones etc. isn't possible to do neatly so thats why I have to have all the files in the same place.


Well I was trying to get as fast a transfer speed as humanly possible for future proofing. I also will be working with 1080p HD video too and I figured if I had a 10Gbit link or a SAS link to the storage that'd be fine to work of 1080p video with. (I can't remember the bitrate but its h.264 in a .mov wrapper from my 5DmkII) I dont know how over ethernet would handle shoving that up and down it.

$430 sounds like a great price! Thats what £260-320 or so + if I sell this Dell card I'll get some money back. That sounds like a price i'd be happy to pay. I'll be claiming my travel money back from the college in January so I know what it'll be getting spent on.

Couple 2 or 4 port PCI-E 1x cards for my music and movies would be fine since performance isnt an issue there.
 
DD_nVidia: I was going over your posts again, and this post makes a couple of assumptions for your needs.

Assumption 1: You need fast storage to edit large amounts of h.264 .mov files with.
Assumption 2: You need a large amount of storage for long term storage.
Assumption 3: You already have a gigabit ethernet network.

Based on those assumptions, here is what I would do. (unhappy_mage suggested part of this earlier)

For editing 1080p files, and editing large amounts of pictures, I would create a 3-4 disk RAID 0 array in my editing machine (Either WD 640 Blacks or VRaptors/Raptors). I would also take the norco and start loading it with 1-2TB drives, with either Openfiler, or a bare linux server with flexRAID for long term storage. You can easily play multiple streams of HD video off of either an Openfiler or FlexRAID setup, just wouldn't be great for editing. (Unhappy_mage brought up some good points about latency in that type of array).

When you are editing a file, move it off of the network storage and onto the scratch disks in your workstation, when it is finished, move it off and onto the network storage.

If money wasn't an issue, I would say use small SSDs for the scratch space, but, you wanted to keep it less expensive.
 
DD_nVidia said:
unhappy_mage -

ah right well, bollocks haha, I'll not be doing that then XD

Well what I was wanting ideally was the data seperated from the system, but I still wanted to connect the data to any system as if they were connected internally in terms of speed (and preferably latency too)

I am a little confused by that expander, it has a pci-e slot on it but if that was in the oter case what would it plug into... My core 2 duo rigs pci-e? With a SAS Raid card with an external port plugging into my Core i7 rigs pci-e? then linking the 2 systems together with the correct cable?????
Click to expand...
Yep, that's the idea. The HP SAS expander only uses the PCI Express slot for power, it doesn't even have a device driver associated with it. So put the SAS controller in the system with the disks in it, then put the controller in the i7 system.

A caveat: I haven't tried connecting a controller to the external port, and it's labeled as a tape expansion unit. You may have to get an external->internal bracket (like Supermicro's CBL-0167L) and plug that into one of the internal ports, then plug the controller into that. All the internal ports will act as either an uplink or downlink just fine, though, so I might suggest not buying that at first, then buy it later if it's needed.
DD_nVidia said:
(different cases is pretty much when I'm trying to do, 20 drives plus a Core i7 oc'd + a Fermi based GPU in one case is gonna scream trouble)
Click to expand...
Eh, a 1KW or so power supply would do that, I think. But two cases is probably easier on the power supplies.
DD_nVidia said:
100MB/s is enough to put one or two yeah, but in Adobe Lightroom I'll generally have 40-60 thumbnails open if not more if they are constantly on the second screen but i'm sure for preview/cache files I'll store them on a 15k drive locally. but I often jump into develop mode which then takes the RAW file and converts it to an image on the fly which already really taxes my i7. but i'll hop hop hop in develop mode usually between images so I'm not sure if just now its the hard drives stopping it from going any faster or the cpu not being able to render any faster. (I'm using Samsung 1TB F3's atm) I'll try and have a look in the performance monitor next time im editing.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's important to optimize for what you actually do ;)
DD_nVidia said:
Well I was trying to get as fast a transfer speed as humanly possible for future proofing. I also will be working with 1080p HD video too and I figured if I had a 10Gbit link or a SAS link to the storage that'd be fine to work of 1080p video with. (I can't remember the bitrate but its h.264 in a .mov wrapper from my 5DmkII) I dont know how over ethernet would handle shoving that up and down it.
Click to expand...
1080p compressed is often fairly low bitrate. My 720p camera generates video that's about 1MB/s, which is ludicrously easy to deal with, so I'd guess a 1080p camera would only be in the 2-3MB/s range.
DD_nVidia said:
$430 sounds like a great price! Thats what £260-320 or so + if I sell this Dell card I'll get some money back. That sounds like a price i'd be happy to pay. I'll be claiming my travel money back from the college in January so I know what it'll be getting spent on.
Click to expand...
I'm very happy with it, but note that it doesn't get you hardware RAID. If you want that, LSI cards are still a good choice, but they're substantially more money than the 3442E-R.
DD_nVidia said:
Couple 2 or 4 port PCI-E 1x cards for my music and movies would be fine since performance isnt an issue there.
Click to expand...
Agreed.
 
Jrdonnaruma -

Assumption 1 - Yes. Very fast. Actually, for the video I'm not sure since its so cpu intensive my core i7 can't do it in real time.

Assumption 2 - Yes. at least 1TB just for photos per year, I've not shot video regularly but I'm getting there (video editing with my files is a biatcch. I've not had the time to sit down and work it out)

Assumption 2 - No. But I can get my hands on a 4... (or 8 ive not checked ) ethernet switch, and the longest cable size would be a couple meters max.

Well I can't go buying 2 rack mount cases, a bunch of 1,2 TB drives then buy another 3 or 4 for an array. The only drive's I'd get would be 500GB per platter drives. they're faster at sequential transfers than the VR's, although the VR's still win on random access but i dont need to do much of that in the real world.

I've not had much experience with linux (just playing about a LITTLE in ubuntu) and none with any of the NAS OS'es.

Also I can't move images from network to local storage because I dont edit in that way, I use lightroom which keeps my catalog of around 60,000 images orgonised for me. I go through them to fast have too many photos to edit in that way :(

I'm using 2 x 74GB 15,500RPM Seagate Cheetahs as my scratch disk for photoshop and lightroom cache, and another 75GB on my onboard SAS controller for my windows page file, and a 146GB 15,500RPM one for my OS, Win 7 Pro x64.


unhappy_mage -

Ok so... This means I can't use my pci express slot in my Core 2 Duo system short of getting a new board. Is there anything I can get just like to power it? (some sort of just pci-e slot?) or does it have to be a full system?

2 Powersupplies would be ideal I can get my hands on another 400-500W PSU just for the hard drives.

Yeah, if it was just for storing movies or muisc i'd be able to get of a LOT cheaper haha.

My 1080p video is 35-40MB/s bitrate haha. 5DMkII video is a killer. Awesome, but a killer. Can't wait for the 24p firmware update in 2010.

Ah its not a hardware RAID card =/ Well I'm not fussed about LSI just something decent bang for buck that works in Windows 7, Server 2008 and Home Server - (possible OS choices in the future)



- I'll draw that little diagram tomorrow haha.
 
DD_nVidia said:
Ok so... This means I can't use my pci express slot in my Core 2 Duo system short of getting a new board. Is there anything I can get just like to power it? (some sort of just pci-e slot?) or does it have to be a full system?
Click to expand...
It'd basically have to be a full system. You could hypothetically use a narrower slot, by cutting out the end of an x1 slot or something.
DD_nVidia said:
2 Powersupplies would be ideal I can get my hands on another 400-500W PSU just for the hard drives.
Click to expand...
That might be a little low, unless you can figure out staggered spinup. You should probably figure on 25W/drive plus whatever the rest of the system takes, to account for simultaneous spinup, power supply aging, and so forth.
DD_nVidia said:
My 1080p video is 35-40MB/s bitrate haha. 5DMkII video is a killer. Awesome, but a killer. Can't wait for the 24p firmware update in 2010.
Click to expand...
Is that megabits or megabytes per second? I was quoting in megabytes, and I'd be quite surprised if video could be written to CF at 40 MB/s. Put it this way: if a minute of video is 2.4GB, then it's megabytes; otherwise, it's megabits.
DD_nVidia said:
Ah its not a hardware RAID card =/ Well I'm not fussed about LSI just something decent bang for buck that works in Windows 7, Server 2008 and Home Server - (possible OS choices in the future)
Click to expand...
Yeah, if nothing else you can always do software raid.
DD_nVidia said:
- I'll draw that little diagram tomorrow haha.
Click to expand...
Diagram?
 
unhappy_mage -

Well I've got 3 or 4 1x slots on my P5B-E and my uncles got a computer shop + the tools so might as well give it a go haha. Probably let him do it, he might be old, but heck, even I'm not stupid enought to let me near things with sharp edges XD

Well I dont plan on shutting it down. Period. I'm not fussed about total power consumption, or the drives spinning down. I sleep with a big air cooler fan thing (i dont think its quite a little AC unit but w/e) plus my pc which has 9 or 10 fans in it i think, so noise isnt really an issue for me personally either. teh 400/500W PSU would also be free.. I can't get my hands on anything over 550 I dont think for free (we don't stock anything higher unless a customer get a bto system)

For just having 6-8 drives in the norco to start with then a 500W should be fine for the Core 2 Duo system? (65nm E6600 @ stock w/ (sigh) ati radeon x1600 (all we had lying around spare aha) I'll have a look around for a bigger psu see if there is any at the back of the shelves that have been forgotten and liberate it for a good cause.

Your right, thats Mb/s - XD yeah MB/s would have been just a little mad. 40MB/s is more like RED's raw footage format or something haha. Still its 4-5MB/s which is still fairly heafty =/ I'd probably rather it was less compressed, its a bugger it kills my i7, cant edit it as is in real time :(

Hmm I'm trying to keep as much load of the CPU as possible since the apps I'm using do use most of or max out my CPU, Plus wouldnt a hardware raid be more reliable? And is a software raid a good idea if you say, like to reformat every 4-6 months? e.g. could i have a software raid, then just like reinstall windows, boot back in, would the software raid automatically setup again (like i dunno how, read something from the drives when it goes to install them that tells it they were in a raid, and what raid, and how they were set up) or would i have to wipe them and start the RAID clean again too?

And yeah, I've just woke up. I just like to draw diagrams just to make sure I'm thinking of it right aha.
 
unhappy_mage said:
A caveat: I haven't tried connecting a controller to the external port, and it's labeled as a tape expansion unit.
Click to expand...

The external port will work as a controller port. I have used it with a HP p411 controller.

unhappy_mage said:
It'd basically have to be a full system. You could hypothetically use a narrower slot, by cutting out the end of an x1 slot or something.
Click to expand...

I powered the hp sas expander in this way. I used a dremel-like tool to open up the end of a x1 pcie slot.

I was very careful, but still figured that there was a good chance that I would wreck the motherboard. Thankfully, it worked.
 
DD_nVidia said:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/HP-SC44ge-HBA...Components_InterfaceCards?hash=item3efad7ce08

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/LSI-SAS-3422E...Components_InterfaceCards?hash=item230445353f


Are those controller cards any good?
Click to expand...
Sure. Both of them look like the LSI 3442E-R I mentioned.
DD_nVidia said:
Also I couldnt find any expanders on ebay, maybe I'm just stupid and cant find them, or maybe just no one is selling =/
Click to expand...
CompuVest seems to have them in stock, and ship internationally. Or there's this eBay listing, if you'd rather do that. It's a lot more money, though.
 
Yeah I saw THAT ebay listing aha. Spose i'll just have to sit and wait for an expander to come around then? Or is there anyway to just have a smaller expander, e.g. 8,10,12,16 port? would that be any cheaper :S
 
DD_nVidia said:
Yeah I saw THAT ebay listing aha. Spose i'll just have to sit and wait for an expander to come around then? Or is there anyway to just have a smaller expander, e.g. 8,10,12,16 port? would that be any cheaper :S
Click to expand...

LSI makes the chips that (AFAIK) everyone uses. They make 12, 28, and 36-connection chips. This means that those are basically the only sizes available.

I have the board for an external 12-port expander sitting around that you can have for half the cost of shipping. It takes SAS 8470 for three ports (two 4-wide, one 3-wide) and one "HSSDC2" for the 12th port, which means cables for it won't be useable on other expanders. This is just the board, and it's meant to fit in a 1u case, which means it's quite wide.
 
unhappy_mage said:
LSI makes the chips that (AFAIK) everyone uses.
Click to expand...

While every other expander that I've ever seen uses the LSI chips, the HP sas expander uses a chip from PMC Sierra.

While you can probably use many different controllers with these expanders, I'd try to stick with a controller + expander based chips from the same vendor.

For the HP sas expander this would be: the HP 410/410i/411, or sas-2 cards from atto.

For LSI based sas expanders this would be: just about any LSI sas hba, several LSI raid cards, Dell sas hba or raid cards.

You will need to read the manual for any hba or raid card to find out the max number of supported disks when connected to an expander. LSI has a nice pdf chart on their site that breaks down what each hba can support.
 
unhappy_mage said:
LSI makes the chips that (AFAIK) everyone uses. They make 12, 28, and 36-connection chips. This means that those are basically the only sizes available.
Click to expand...

LSI and PMC-Sierra are the only two that make SAS expander chips to my knowledge.
 
So... what your saying is unhappy_mage has a controller and expander with 2 different makes of chips working - and that this is very lucky and that I should not attempt to do this at home?
 
I finally got round to drwaing a diagram. Picture taken with my iPhone so not the best quality I'll take one with my camera tomorrow. Sorta shows what I'm looking at without spending to much money on drives.

8hrb.jpg
 
No need to post a higher res photo of your diagram. Your original photo makes your diagram talent very clear.
You should consider a career as a UPS spokesman.

DD_nVidia said:
So... what your saying is unhappy_mage has a controller and expander with 2 different makes of chips working - and that this is very lucky and that I should not attempt to do this at home?
Click to expand...

I can only write for myself. But if you don't already own some of the parts, buy parts from the same manufacturer, or at least parts that the manufacturer has verified as compatible with their product.
 
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