Recommend me a Raid card

[Abula]

Hi,

I'm looking for a hardware raid PCIe card to do Raid6 of 8 drives, im trying to get around 1500MB/s from the array with pure mechanical, the array will be used mostly to for video editing.

Thanks for any suggestions,

 

[drescherjm]

Look LSI based RAID cards. 2108 or 2208 models are good options:

https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...and-hba-complete-listing-plus-oem-models.599/

 

[Master_shake_]

I've got three 12 drive raid 6 arrays all 7200 rpm drives and there is no way any of them hit 1500MB/s.

Maybe it's because of the expanders and only being pci-e 2.0 LSI 9260-4i but it seems like a pretty big request from mechanical drives.

Unless 15k rpm drives.

 

[capt_cope]

While my experience is limited (I've only ever used an LSI 9280-8e and areca ARC-1882x) my usage was very similar - I needed lots of FAST storage for video and motion graphics work. If you're OK with losing everything on the array you should be able to hit the numbers you're looking for with spinning disks in a raid 0, if you need redundancy you might get away with a raid 10. Just about any card is going to work well for your use case (unless you need remote management etc.) and it will really come down to budget. I've used both areca and LSI cards, and they both did the job well.

But you should ask yourself how much FAST storage do you really need? Raid arrays are another layer of complexity and crap that can break, if you're making money with your video work I'd think long and hard about using a 1tb m.2 ssd for your editing drive and a massive raid 1 array for archive.

I've got three 12 drive raid 6 arrays all 7200 rpm drives and there is no way any of them hit 1500MB/s.

Maybe it's because of the expanders and only being pci-e 2.0 LSI 9260-4i but it seems like a pretty big request from mechanical drives.

Unless 15k rpm drives.

It *MIGHT* be possible to hit 1500MB/s in raid 6 with 15k drives, but iirc I only ever hit 1100-1200MB/s using 8 x 146gb 10k sas drives in a raid 5 with my LSI 9280-8E.

 

[drescherjm]

You are very likely not going to do 1500 MB / s with only 8 hard drives. That is over the maximum transfer rate for SATA drives (unless you do raid 0) and only use the outer section of the drives. Although the latest 15K SAS3 drives may be able to achieve that.

https://www.servethehome.com/seagate-launches-final-15k-rpm-hard-drive-rip-15k-hdds/

https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-15-e-900DS1958-2-1710US-en_US.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/900GB-Enter-...F8&qid=1511366199&sr=8-1&keywords=ST900MP0006

for these you will need a SAS 12GBit card using one of the LSI SAS3108 based controllers.

Drive specs are 300 MB/s in the outer tracks to 200 MB/s in the inner tracks. SO for the outer tracks with 8 drives 6 * 300 (parity don't really count) may be able to achieve 1500 MB/s with some regularity. The inner tracks it clearly will not.

With the cost of these + the controller you may want to go SSD.

 

[Abula]

Thanks to all that have replied with suggestions and comments,

The reason i open this thread is i saw a video, Qnap TVS-1282T3 Detailed 1 Month Review - 4x Thunderbolt 3, 2x 10Gbe & MUCH MORE! that used a QNAP TVS-1282T3 and was reaching 1450 MB/s sustained 1600 peaks MB/s with only 8 mechanical drives, but to achieve this he used Thunderbolt3, i dont plan nor have Thunderbolt3, but i would benefit from those speed editing, so i decided to find a way to do what he did with only 8 mechancial drives, so my thought was a look for a good PCIe Raid Controller card, in my mind it should be as capable or more than a premade nas can achieve, but with your comments it seems it might not be possible?

 

[drescherjm]

I say it's not easy to do. I say you can't do it with raid6 and 8 SATA drives. Even the fastest SATA drives will not be fast enough (I believe all SATA drives in existence max out less than 250MB/s). I did not watch the review however the 1450MB/s is most likely measuring the performance of data cached in the RAM of the NAS and not the performance of uncached raid6 with only 8 SATA hard drives.

 

[Abula]

Will a LSI 9361-8i RAID be good enough for a 8 disk raid6 or would i get better performance on another raid controller? and for my purpose is there much gain on 2gb cache over the 1gb?

 

[capt_cope]

Will a LSI 9361-8i RAID be good enough for a 8 disk raid6 or would i get better performance on another raid controller? and for my purpose is there much gain on 2gb cache over the 1gb?

That card is probably overkill for what you're looking to do, but I still don't think you'll hit 1500MB/s with 8 sata disks in raid6. And unless your workflow is in 480p you probably won't see much sustained benefit from the 2gb cache.