Tell me why 12-16 SATA drives in a RAID array is bad.

O

Order

Gawd
Joined
Dec 8, 2004
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I want astonishingly high I/Os and low access times for my PC-in-progress. It will be used for heavy multitasking that includes (but isn't limited to) gaming, folding, encoding, etc. I'm guessing a RAID 5 or 50 would give me the best performance for my money and provide some data integrity, although I'm going to have a few larger drives off the array for backups so it isn't an absolute priority.
I'm liking the way the Areca cards perform, although I'm not sure if I should go with a pair of Broadcoms because they allow spanning. Either way, I'm planning on maxing out the RAM on the controllers because I figure there will be a ton of cache-hits with an array this large.
I know I won't be limited by my other hardware: an X2 4400 and 2gB of RAM on one of the high-end 939 SLI boards should do the trick.
What do you guys think?
$53 for 80gB WD SATA at newegg is almost too good to pass up.
 
The main concern is going to be heat... that's going to need a huge case with really good cooling (and a beefy PSU) to keep all those drives working. You're also going to be at a lower cost/GB with the 80gb drives than, say a 250GB for ~$120 - I'm not sure how much perfomance boost you'd see from having 3x as many drives, if any.

Also, you might want to think about going Opteron with a server class board that can handle PCI-X as well as PCI-E which could expand your possible choice of controller cards. (AFAIK, no mainstream s939 board have PCI-X.)
 
I was thinking that I should put it all in a large rack-mounted chassis. I don't think the Opteron MB will be necessary if I use the Areca option because they have PCI-e controllers and I'm not going to be using SLI so I'll have the slot(s) available.
 
Order said:
I was thinking that I should put it all in a large rack-mounted chassis. I don't think the Opteron MB will be necessary if I use the Areca option because they have PCI-e controllers and I'm not going to be using SLI so I'll have the slot(s) available.
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You really should think about saving yourself a bunch of money. That many drives is going to be loud and hot. Also rackmount cases designed to handle that many drives are pricey. If you are looking to spend that kind of scratch I would go with drives larger than 80gb. 200-300s at the least.

I've had a machine in my house running before with 9 HDDs and honestly the noise gets old. As for the power supply question you could go with with either that 850 watt beast from PC Power and Cooling or someone else now has a 1000 watt beast. Should provide enough power for that number of drives.
 
This is the chassis I'm looking at:
http://www.rackmountpro.com/productpage.php?prodid=1811
With regards to $ vs. GB, I'm not dead set on the WD 80s. Some of the Seagate 7200.7s with NCQ are in the low $110s for about 200GB so I might go with those. Cost isn't too much of an issue, as I've allocated about $2500 to the storage array. Noise won't bother me much, but I will take that into consideration when I'm researching the drives.
 
Ive got 14 disk drives in my V-2100 and room for plenty more if I wanted. Heat is only an issue in the GPU area, but I took care of that with watercooling. All 14 of my disks are cooled by just one 120mm fan and everything works great.
 
If you can hold out for SAS, Fujitsu MAU will be more cost effective in delivering ultra high end desktop application performance, and you can use SATA-3G ATA drives on the same controller. This will meet your performance and capacity requirements, while using less physical space, and running much cooler/quieter.
 
DougLite said:
If you can hold out for SAS, Fujitsu MAU will be more cost effective in delivering ultra high end desktop application performance, and you can use SATA-3G ATA drives on the same controller. This will meet your performance and capacity requirements, while using less physical space, and running much cooler/quieter.
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SAS?
 
RM414s oh how I love, and hate, that chassis. These things need a dedicated server room else be prepared to be deafened! RM414s start off LOUD, then they get hot and well pass the ear defenders thanks :eek:. If I was going for that chassis I'd recommend going for 3ware controllers run multi-lane, I duno who makes the back-planes but the 3ware multi-lane are much more useful than 4x std SATA cables (routing 16 SATA cables around the chassis can be a nightmare). Multi-lane however means PCI-X & Opterons & much more expense all round.

My big recommend for a home file-server is lian-li PC-V2000 series, you can put down 22 disks with ease even with an optical drive. To cram in 22 drives you use 5-in-3 cages thus up to 10 drives could be hot-swap, okay it's not as effective as the RM414 but it's close, a lot quieter & is much better for using non-multi-lane connectors (what you want with your preferred controllers). Finally, I think 250 or 300GB drives hit the optimum space per dollar marker & any decent RAID system will let you hot-insert and expand new arrays.

FYI: this is what runs in my PC-V2100
Intel SE7210TP1-ES
Celron 2.66GHz
2GB PC3200
FSP 550w EPS psu
HPT1820A
HPT454
1xSeagate Savvio
1x400GB HDD
8x250GB HDD
4x120GB HDD
2xSupermicro CSE-M35T1 5-in-3 cage
 
StoneNewt said:
My big recommend for a home file-server is lian-li PC-V2000 series, you can put down 22 disks with ease even with an optical drive. To cram in 22 drives you use 5 to 3 cages thus up to 10 drives could be hot-swap, okay it's not as effective as the RM414 but it's close, a lot quieter & is much better for using non-multi-lane connectors (what you want with your preferred controllers). Finally, I think 250 or 300GB drives hit the optimum space per dollar marker & any decent RAID system will let you hot-insert and expand new arrays.
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Yeah even with all the racks in the 5.25 bays, there still is plenty of room in the PSU compartment (although once you get to the 20+ disk drives, you might need two PSUs!! unless you get 850w from PCPnC)
 
J-Mag said:
Yeah even with all the racks in the 5.25 bays, there still is plenty of room in the PSU compartment (although once you get to the 20+ disk drives, you might need two PSUs!! unless you get 850w from PCPnC)
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If you want to go super 550w I'd go for a 3U 2+1 redundant PSU and cut the HDD bay through to the PSU section.
 
Just buy yourself a drive bay or two that have a removable tray, buy 14 trays, and you are all set. Not like you need all your DVDs online at any given instance. It will run you like $200 for the hardware, and you will prolong your drive life by having most of them offline all the time, as well as cut down on noise and use less electricity.

Edit: I just realized that the OP wasn't talking about storing DVD images. Still bays and trays may be a viable option instead of getting the rackmount, depending on usage.
 
The SAS technology and MAU drives would annihilate my budget, lol. I will be running a MAU for my operating system I think but an array of those would be obscenely expensive at over $200 each. Trust me, I want an array of them but unless someone gives me a 2nd job I'm going to have to fantasize about them and nothing more.

I was considering a Lian-Li V2100b for a while but I just don't think it would work for the situation. I have a Cisco router and a 24 port Dell gigabit switch that will already be racked so I want to stick with that standard. I'm pondering a seperate storage chassis with a SATA-SCSI backplane that can get attached to a seperate chassis that would be the compute node.
 
They're only $176 here. Just one of them would smoke an array of who knows how many WD800JDs though :) Also, a $176 on one MAU will get you more I/O per sec than three WD800JDs in RAID-0, for the same price, when it comes to bootup, loading programs, games, etc. Then you can save up for the more cost effective 250GB drives for media storage.
 
Thats a really good point, Doug...
For around the same price I can get 10-12 of those along with a 300 or 400 gig for media...
You magnificant bastard.
 
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