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Requesting feedback about fileserver setup...

A

Atragon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 31, 2004
Messages
338
I'm throwing together a large storage array and I'm wondering which will be a better approach given my needs of initial space of 500GB or larger in RAID 5 with a hot spare available, but capable of scaling to over 1.5 TB... I've got my eyes on 2 controllers, the Areca ARC-1160 (16 port SATA II), or the Broadcom/RAIDCore BC4852 (8 port SATA I). The Areca is more expensive, but offers RAID 6 if I should want to go that way, its own XOR engine, and onboard cache... the Broadcom is much less expensive, does not offer RAID 6, does not have its own XOR engine, and uses system RAM for cache, but it costs about 1/3rd of the Areca and can support cross-controller arrays *unlike the Areca which is why I don't list the ARC-1120 because I forsee eventually going over 8 drives in the array*.

So, any thoughts as to which is the better approach?

Note, I'll be running this storage array on the following:
Tyan K8SE
2x Opteron 246
1GB PC3200 ECC Registered DDR
2x80GB SATA HDDs in RAID 1 on the onboard RAID controller.
 
Is this computer a dedicated server?

If so then go with the cheaper cards.....
If you are going to be using it for other tasks then the ARC-1160 would be better. Because it has it's own processor and memory and wouldn't be sharing the computers resources.

It boils down to what are you going to be using it for.

There a lot of people that have built dedicated servers running a linux software RAID setup that is much cheaper to do than the highend card. But they are using this server as a network fileserver on a small network for movies, music, and file storage tasks. Their network speed is the limiting factor and not the software RAID.

Luck

 
If you're using this as a fileserver alone, the broadcom cards or something like them make a good plan. However, I'd stay away from that particular card; although it is indeed really fast, it's still software raid, and it's locked in to Broadcom's format. If you get a plain-ol-sata card and run Linux software raid on it, you'll be able to move the array to a different machine, a different card, anything.

However, if this is going to be anything but a NAS box, go for the Areca; it's an incredible piece of hardware. Linux support is solid from what I hear. And you can't go wrong with a raid card with an ethernet port on it ;)

 
I'm intending on running this on a dual opteron 246 box running server2k3 enterprise x64 edition which may be transcoding video and/or running bit-torrent. Files will be served over a gigabit ethernet network.

Edit: the transcoding would be from uncompressed MPEG2 video to something a bit more reasonable in size.
 
Atragon said:
I'm intending on running this on a dual opteron 246 box running server2k3 enterprise x64 edition which may be transcoding video and/or running bit-torrent. Files will be served over a gigabit ethernet network.

Edit: the transcoding would be from uncompressed MPEG2 video to something a bit more reasonable in size.
Click to expand...
*cough* oxymoron *cough* MPEG2 is compressed.

Running BT and compressing files can be pretty processor intensive. If it is going to be doing both on a regular basis, it might be worth the extra money for the Areca. But you have so much horsepower that it might not be worth it. It depends how much you think you're going to be doing.

Serving or downloading BT? That makes quite a difference in terms of disk access type.

 
unhappy_mage said:
*cough* oxymoron *cough* MPEG2 is compressed.

Running BT and compressing files can be pretty processor intensive. If it is going to be doing both on a regular basis, it might be worth the extra money for the Areca. But you have so much horsepower that it might not be worth it. It depends how much you think you're going to be doing.

Serving or downloading BT? That makes quite a difference in terms of disk access type.

Click to expand...

Hmm? I thought mpeg2 was only encoded and not compressed... ah well, my statement still stands, high quality mpeg2 files are huge compared to something encoded in divx or other codecs.

I'll be both downloading and serving bit torrent, but not incredably frequently, it's something I could offload to another system I have sitting around quite easily.

I'm pretty sure that if I were to go with the broadcom card I wouldn't run into a CPU limitation, but I'm not certain of that unfortunately since I'll probably wind up scaling the array up eventually to 15 disks. :(
 
The broadcom cards will use a really small amount of CPU. With a similar raid 5-in-software setup, I can do about 1.9GB/s of raid5 calculations on a 933 mHz p3. The opteron 246s can absolutely pwn that. I'd say it sounds like you're not disk-bound in this case, so using CPU to handle it shouldn't be a problem; go for the Broadcoms.

 
unhappy_mage said:
The broadcom cards will use a really small amount of CPU. With a similar raid 5-in-software setup, I can do about 1.9GB/s of raid5 calculations on a 933 mHz p3. The opteron 246s can absolutely pwn that. I'd say it sounds like you're not disk-bound in this case, so using CPU to handle it shouldn't be a problem; go for the Broadcoms.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, I'll try the broadcom card out and see how it works.
 
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