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Raid Card/ Raid Array - 10x 2TB Drives

T

thecaptainjs

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Sep 6, 2011
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I have at least 8-10 2TB Drives, and I am looking to put them all in a raid 6.
So I need some help figuring out how to do this. Would need a decent Raid Card for my HTPC or someway to make use of all these drives.

Mainly looking for a place to store my stuff/ act as a server for PLEX.


Currently I have: GTX 460
AMD Phenom II X4 925
4GB Ram
ASUS Tek M4A87TD

Suggestions welcome, thanks!
I Willing to spend a few hundred to get something decent
 
Home use? Personally i'd say avoid hardware RAID as that's just asking for trouble if the thing ever dies. I'd still recommend a "RAID" card though, toss it in "IT Mode" via firmware flash so it just presents the drives to the host OS. One card with two SAS ports can speak to 8 drives with the right cables.

Someone else will have to chip in as to card suggestions, i'm a bit out of date as to what the current good cards are. I've got a Dell H200 in my storage server that's been working great after I flashed it though.
 
A lot depends on your experience level and your preferred OS. If you don't want to have to do much tinkering/setup and Windows is your preferred OS, get yourself a used Areca R6 card off fleabay. If you are up for a little more setup, go with an esxi/ZFS installation and build yourself a NAS.
 
FnordMan said:
Home use? Personally i'd say avoid hardware RAID as that's just asking for trouble if the thing ever dies. I'd still recommend a "RAID" card though, toss it in "IT Mode" via firmware flash so it just presents the drives to the host OS. One card with two SAS ports can speak to 8 drives with the right cables.
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Or he could buy a commonly available RAID card. When I've used HW RAID cards I buy a spare. Dell PERC6i and PERC5i cards were cheap enough via eBay about 5 years ago when I built several systems with them that I could buy several of them for the price of one new LSI equivalent, and I did just that.
 
I do server work, and I might even have some raid cards I can pull out of some old Poweredge R710's.
That being said I dont have enough time to mess around so something simple would be better.

I'd also like to use this as an HTPC so windows for sure.
 
Eh, I think 10x drives would be plenty of space, I think if I was going to go higher then that I'd just get bigger drives.
 
Win10 storage space, formatted REFS with 2 copies of your data. No raid card needed, just sata ports.
 
thecaptainjs said:
Eh, I think 10x drives would be plenty of space, I think if I was going to go higher then that I'd just get bigger drives.
Click to expand...
So, do you have 2 free PCIe slots? One of them at least x8?

The cheapest way in is something like this:

- Dell PERC 6i card for under $15. NOTE: it will not support drives larger than 2TiB!
- SAS expander to give you 10 drive support since the card can only support 8 drives by itself. The HP SAS expander @ $65 works decently.
- At least one SFF-8484 to SFF-8087 cable to connect the SAS expander to the PERC 6i.
- SFF-8087 to SATA breakout cables (make sure you don't get reverse ones) and you can plug in up to 28 2TiB SATA drives to the SAS expander.

You'll likely want to add a battery backup unit to the PERC 6i for better write performance. You don't want one that is old. It will either already be failed or really close to failing. You have to look at the date code on the battery. Expect a recent one to cost about $40-50.

Now, having proposed that, I wouldn't buy a PERC 6i card now. You can't put larger drives on it later, but it's cheap. However, you could use it for now and replace it later when you want to use larger drives.

If you're okay with software RAID you can use an HBA, like an LSI 9211-8i in IT mode or crossflashed Dell PERC H200 / H310 or IBM ServeRAID M1015 card with the same HP SAS expander (also supporting up to 28 internal drives). You could also use a different HW RAID card in place of the Dell PERC 6i, like a LSI 9265-8i if you want higher performance and support for drives larger than 2TB. Note these will use a different cable to connect the card to the SAS expander.
 
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Gotta watch it with some of those cards, esp the Dell PERC... last I checked, that Dell PERC will draw at least 25w from the pci-e slot, so don't drop it into any older boards that won't support the power draw. Don't want to brown out the card, or risk it burning a trace on your motherboard.
 
acquacow said:
Gotta watch it with some of those cards, esp the Dell PERC... last I checked, that Dell PERC will draw at least 25w from the pci-e slot, so don't drop it into any older boards that won't support the power draw. Don't want to brown out the card, or risk it burning a trace on your motherboard.
Click to expand...
Where did you come up with that one? First of all PCIe slots are rated to deliver 25W. Second, the Dell PERC cards do not consume 25W. RAID card are nearly always under 15W, generally closer to 10W.
 
Stereodude said:
Where did you come up with that one? First of all PCIe slots are rated to deliver 25W. Second, the Dell PERC cards do not consume 25W. RAID card are nearly always under 15W, generally closer to 10W.
Click to expand...
First of all, the PCI-e spec calls for 25w per slot, but not all manufacturers actually lay the traces on the board to support that. Dell for one was a big offender in the past. I spent 5 years at Fusion-io selling 25w pci-e flash drives and installing them into thousands of servers. You'd be surprised how many can't actually support a fully populated pci-e bus.

ie: the Dell R710 has 4 slots, but only supports a max of two 25w cards regardless of what slots you put them in. The remaining cards have to be 15w or less.
The PERC card that came with the R710 was a 25w card limiting us to only being able to install one ioDrive per R710 that had a PERC installed... else the box would brown-out and shut off under high write workload.

I spent 5 years working with Dell/HP/IBM/Supermicro engineering to map out all of their server offerings and all the pci-e power constraints for each generation of servers.
 
Thanks guys, I am going to take a look and see what raid cards I can pull out of my servers, but perhaps I'll just bunch them together and use Snapraid, Freenas or something similar. I;d like to run Windows so I can do gaming, so anything out there similar to snapraid that I can consider?

I really appreciate the help.
 
SnapRAID also works undeer windows. StableBit Drivepool may also be an option with or without SnapRAID. I can not help with StableBit.
 
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