New Build Questions\Recomendations

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Solarnet

n00b
Joined
Jan 11, 2010
Messages
48
New to the forums:

I have been running WHS for a little over a year now and am going to be rebuilding my system and am looking for some advice.

I'm currently running WHS as a virtual machine under Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

Here's how I have it configured now

Motherboard has 2 - HW RAID Sata ports and 6 - Non-RAID Sata ports
On-Board HW RAID Controller

2 - 1TB - In RAID 0 with 2 - 1TB Partitions
Drive C - Server 2008 R2 Boot Partition
Drive D - Hyper-V Partition (Contains WHS Virtual System Drive)

Highpoint Rocketraid 3560 RAID 24-port Controller

5 - 2TB Drives (WHS Data Drives) (Presented to VM as RAW Drives)
7 - 1.5TB Drives (WHS Data Drives) (Presented to VM as RAW Drives)
4 - 1TB Drives (WHS Data Drives) (Presented to VM as RAW Drives)

What I'm considering is moving the system to a Norco 4020 Case and was thinking. Do I really need the Raid card or could I use 2 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 instead and sell of the 3560 and use the money for more 2TB Drives to replace some of the other 2TB Drives. If I did sell off and got say $700 - $750 for the Rocketraid 3560 (Paid $819.00)
I could buy the Norco 4020 and still have enough for at least 3 - 2TB Drives.

Should I be concerned about performance? Anything else I should consider?

Richard
 
On-Board HW RAID Controller; you probably mean software RAID controller with this one? If not what chip are we talking about?

Don't have much to add to your story. But i do want to mention that the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 may have some issues that the LSI 1068E chip does not have. So generally, i recommend this controller instead:
http://www.intel.com/products/server/raid-controllers/SASUC8I/SASUC8I-overview.htm

It would be especially great for software RAID arrays, but also has RAID capabilities of its own.
 
Are you leaving WHS as a VM in this new configuration? I personally wouldn't run a server OS on a RAID 0 array.

Selling the 24 port card makes sense, many here have gone the way of the Supermicro cards just to get cheap ports. 'Performance' as it pertains to WHS seems sort of moot - it's just a file server. I've run WHS on several platforms - Athlon64, E5200, E2200, E6600, and Pentium4 and they all run the same. So unless you're doing something in Server 2008 that can take advantage of more performance then I'd say you'll hardly notice any difference.
 
Yes, WHS will be kept as a VM. My concern is will switching to the supermicro cards slow tranfere compared to the rocketraid. I do not use raid for the data drives. The Raid 0 of the server 2008 Boot Drive is mainly to improve Performance in DVD Processing and I also run several other VM for testing purposes. OS Drive is Backed up daily for safty.
 
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