which hdd controller

J

jetfire

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 16, 2010
Messages
221
hi

got a bit of a problem and need more hdds in my server as i only have space for 5 and the optical drive on the motherboard.

now is it possible to put a raid controller in another box with the hdds in and connect it to my server like a sas expander?

i have 1 pcie x4 slot left inside the server to connect to what ever it is i need to put in there but not sure what i need to get to setup something like that, and the price of the ready made stuff is just crazy money.
 
You can use a SAN depending on your budget, but a DAS might be a bit cheaper depending on how many drives you want to use.

eSATA or external SAS can work if you put the controller card in your server, or for the SAN, you can use a fibre channel HBA card and line to it.

The cheapest solution though would be to buy or build a NAS and/or use external HDDs with eSATA. Though the performance with NASs is kind of lame unless you have a custom built model. External HDDs are ok, but there is no redundancy with just a single drive, so multiple models must be used.

Either way, unless you have the parts, be prepared to put down a pretty penny. ;)
 
hi

i think i should of spent more on a case as i should of said there is no room for any more hdds in the case i have and if i change it ill lose my 3 years warranty unless i send it back for the work to be done and they aint cheap.

i did look at esata or external but i need to stream data from each drive and its not fast enough for what i want.

what i want to do is run 10-15 audio tracks from each drive at 192khz over about 20 hdds i need speed not space.

looks like I'm just going to have to get a high end hdd controller and a case i can put a load of drives in it.
 
jetfire said:
i did look at esata or external but i need to stream data from each drive and its not fast enough for what i want.
Click to expand...

What kind of budget are you on? What kinds of speeds are you looking for? Are you needing a certain kind of RAID? Is JBOD acceptable?

Can you give some more information about your case/system?

If you're looking for "on the cheap" -- you could look at a SAS expander solution:


So for roughly $640, you can have space for 8 additional SAS drives.

I know it's not 20 drives.... but if you have 5 internal, and 8 external... it's a start. You can work up from there if you're willing to put more money into it....
 
When I think of this any performance problem would most likely be caused by needing fast random io and not STR. Audio files are not many GBs each. Adding 20 drives in raid 0 will get you a lot of STR (2GB /s depending on the raid controller ) but not give you anywhere near the random io of a single SSD.
 
audio is not really demanding on HDDs. sequential reading. what is the bandwidth you need, specifically, in MB/second ? is the traffic being used by the OS, like for audio editing software), or are these audio tracks streaming to some external (possibly over internet) client? how big are the individual files? 5MB mp3's? 500MB FLACs?
 
How much speed? Can you get an SSD or just more ram / ramdisk? Or a raid controller with a cache? To me audio is not that demanding on hard disk performance?
Click to expand...

audio at 44.1khz does not need alot of hdd performance but when you up it to 192khz you go from 100 tracks per drive down to 10 thus the need for so many.

ssd are still to expensive even tho they are faster.

What kind of budget are you on? What kinds of speeds are you looking for? Are you needing a certain kind of RAID? Is JBOD acceptable?
Click to expand...

not sure i even need raid i just need a way to keep adding hdds so i think jbod would work.

Can you give some more information about your case/system?
Click to expand...

dual xeon 2.4 cpus
tyan s7010 mobo
12gig ddr
5 1tb hdds
1 dvd
1200w power station
ati 5850
ati cheapo
motu pci 424 card
case was made buy the place i got it from and was made to be quiet i did put some pics up in the case mods section ect but with just two hdds in it. i also have to leave some space between the drives for the fan at the front. good cheap case but useless for lots of hdds.

i did see that 8 bay thing so might get one of them as i can always use it for extra storage
 
audio at 44.1khz does not need alot of hdd performance but when you up it to 192khz you go from 100 tracks per drive down to 10 thus the need for so many.
Click to expand...

I do not understand what you are trying to say here.

To me a single 256GB SSD would be better than 20 hard drives. And also a lot cheaper. You said space was not an issue but performance.
 
I do not understand what you are trying to say here.

To me a single 256GB SSD would be better than 20 hard drives. And also a lot cheaper. You said space was not an issue but performance.
Click to expand...

the data rate for each audio track whould be 55mb per second at 192khz wave file.
 
jetfire said:
the data rate for each audio track whould be 55mb per second at 192khz wave file.
Click to expand...

Now that makes a little more sense. A normal hard drive does around 1 GBit / second. Although because of random IO you will not get anywhere near 18 tracks at at time per disk. Your number of 10 could be reasonable for reading. I doubt for writing.
With ssds around 3 GBit / second. They are much better at random IO. A guess would say 30 tracks at a time on an SSD.

How many tracks are you reading at once?
 
How many tracks are you reading at once?
Click to expand...

well if i can get up to 200 tracks that should be enough but I'm not sure if even a hi end controller could do this amount on its own.
 
What kind of audio files are they? MP3 and AAC are easy, even at 192KHz and 320Kbps.

But if you are using a lossless codec such as FLAC or WAV, then bandwidth will definitely be needed.

I'd give subsonic music server a try, it can encode/decode FLAC to MP3 format on the fly, and is free. I use it on my server for my network and internet, and I can successfully use it with my upload speed of only 40KB/s. ;)
 
he has said they are wav files. however he has not said what they are encoded in, or what uses them, or several other important questions i asked about how they are to be used. although it sounds like studio mixing from what you have said. its very hard to give you good advice when you withhold information.

for instance- i might suggest creating two storage pools, one faster but smaller one to hold files you are actively using, and one much larger but slower pool to throw the data you dont need to actively edit/play. but i have no idea if this is how you are using the files.....

i dont have enough information to tell if raw disk read speeds, per file, are 55mb/sec, or if that number you mentioned was just the output filesize after you mix them all togeter. or something else entirely. hard drives can read sequentially at 60-120mb/sec for most 7200rpm SATA2 drives, so 10-15 files per hard disk @ 55mb/sec for each file doesnt add up.
 
yes it is for music production i use nuendo 5 as my daw software and motu hd192 interfaces.

the main reason for so many tracks is when mixing say an full Orchestra where i need to layer a lot of the same instruments together to get the sound i need that's why i need lots of tracks as it soon builds up. its ok at 44.1 but at 192 is impossible with what i have.

i got the 55mb from another site so you are probley right but either way its not going to be a lot of tracks from each drive:(
 
How many more drives are you trying to get? If 8 is enough I'd think something like a SAS card with two external 4 port sockets.

Then get a case with bays for 8 drives, use adaptor backplates to bring the SAS cables into the case and then use a couple of breakout cables for the final connections to the drives.

For the PSU I'd probablly build a simple transistor circuit so that power in the first case triggers the PS_ON line of the PSU in the second case.
 
what is your realistic budget for this?

can you list exactly what hardware you already have?
 
what is your realistic budget for this?
Click to expand...

under a grand UK

can you list exactly what hardware you already have?
Click to expand...

just got the server so id have to buy the controller hdds and the box for them to go in.

now with these is it possible to use two if i get a different controller as the one that comes with it only has two for the 8 drives.

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/home/p...01t-8-Bay-eSATA-DAS-Enclosure?source=googleps

and one of these so i could run 2 -16 drives

http://www.megacomponents.com/acata...2_RAID_4_Channel_Controller__Retail_9034.html
 
Could you? Yes. That controller is Port Multiplier (PM) Ready, and rated for up to 16 or 20 e-SATA devices, and "supports" RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD.

However... I thought you said...

jetfire said:
i did look at esata or external but i need to stream data from each drive and its not fast enough for what i want.
Click to expand...
 
Could you? Yes. That controller is Port Multiplier (PM) Ready, and rated for up to 16 or 20 e-SATA devices, and "supports" RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD.
Click to expand...

well that's good to know at least i'm learning.

However... I thought you said...


Quote:
Originally Posted by jetfire
i did look at esata or external but i need to stream data from each drive and its not fast enough for what i want.
Click to expand...

well ill still need alot of storage so id give it a go with that and see how many tracks i can get out of it.

but i have been looking at these but they aint cheap and ill have to save for a bit before i can buy all the stuff i would need and i found some cheap fiber 8 port switches on ebay

http://www.span.com/product_info.php?products_id=22309&source=gbaseuk&currency=GBP
 
dsumike said:
Could you? Yes. That controller is Port Multiplier (PM) Ready, and rated for up to 16 or 20 e-SATA devices, and "supports" RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD.

However... I thought you said...
Click to expand...

The big problem is with that is performance will be limited to how many 3GBit / s links you use. I think that is a serious limitation. Especially if the external enclosure only has 1 input ESATA 2 port thus making the entire enclosure with 8 drives have only a little more bandwith than a single current generation ssd.

I think if this is the rout that the OP wants to take he needs a SAS enclosure.
 
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drescherjm said:
I think if this is the rout that the OP wants to take he needs a SAS enclosure.
Click to expand...

I'd agree, and with his budget of trying to stay under a thousand dollars, I think the TowerRAID TR8X SAS enclosure that was linked on page 1 is probably his best bet. The device claims transfer rates of up to 750MB/s with a decent RAID controller card.

Of course, all of this assumes that he has a separate budget for drives... :)
 
i don't suppose there is a cheap 16-24 bay rack mount sas expander? all the ones i can find costs thousands of pounds for what i can tell is a empty box with a psu and some sort of controller that connects to all the hdds.
 
Well, you are doubling and tripling the size of what we have been talking about at this point, going from an 8-bay enclosure to a 16, or 24 bays. So it's only justified that you should be doubling and tripling the cost.

There are some smaller rackmount solutions you could look at, such as:


This would allow you to "get started" at a reasonably affordable price, and you could look at adding second unit it it works out well for you.

If you want to jump straight into a 16 or 24 bay SAS expander unit, you're stuck in the multiple thousands. However, if this is a true server solution, you may want to consider spending the extra money and getting a nicer unit with more bays and redundant power supplies, something like this would be "nicer":


The old saying, "you get what you pay for" still applies...
 
Do you have any hardware now such that you can benchmark to try to gauge exactly what type of performance you actually need? I mean do a test with 2 hard drives and see how many channels that can support.

Then you need to investigate all of the points that can cause a bottleneck. There will be limits in performance on the PCIe bus, limits depending on how much bandwidth and IOPs the RAID controller can handle. Limits on how much the cables can handle. If you use expanders those will have limits. And on top of that the hard drives themselves will have limits in IOPs. I will not expect it to be easy or cheap to plug in 20 hard drives and get all 20 to each be able to give you 100 MB/s at once.
 
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had a think about it and would rather go with sas expanders is the way to go, also i don't think i need raid so jbods will do.

now would this setup work.

this in my server
http://www.span.com/product_info.php?products_id=26197&source=gbaseuk&currency=GBP

in to this

http://www.span.com/product_info.php?products_id=32328&source=gbaseuk&currency=GBP

put that in this as i already have one,mine is called a xcase and don't have the fans behind the hdds.



http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...sk=view&id=325&Itemid=61&limit=1&limitstart=3

then add 3 of these for the 15 hdds.

http://www.xcase.co.uk/hotswap-stoarge-kit-p/hddkit-xx-500.htm

comes to about 780 uk p for the bits my end and saves me 2200 quid making my own.
 
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