Zakari's Home Build

[Zakari]

A couple of years back, I swapped my 7 external USB hard drives to a Qnap T410 with 5.5 TB available in RAID 5.

I now have outgrown that capacity (and am bored with the very very slow writing speeds of this device) so I'm moving to something a bit bigger, here's what I chose :

Case : Norco 4220
Cooling : Replaced everything with Noctua, got a 120mm plane for the center fans

Mobo : Supermicro X9SCI-LN4F-O
CPU : Xeon E3 1270
RAM : 16Gb ECC 1333
OS HDD : Crucial m4 64Gb

Left to buy :

Areca 1882 IX 24
20x Samsung 2TB HD204UI

Going for this Mobo for the number of LAN ports & IPMI features.
I hesitated a lot between going for a small RAID card + expander or go with a big one, and with shipping to FR, the price difference between the 2 solutions is not that much so I decided to get the IX 24 (my mobo doesnt leave me the choice now)

I'll upgrade my network (both switch and "work" rig) at a later point and will post a link to the thread here. (Probably Intel Quad NIC + Cisco 200 Fanless Switch)

For the RAID Array, I'm going with RAID 6 + Hot Spare, OS will be 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, and I'll setup a Software iSCSI target like this one : link
This will help me have a fast & secure local disk on my desktop, which is usefull when you photoshop scans of big film cameras (6x6 cm film)
I know that this software target is probably not respecting the specs of iSCSI but since I'm gonna use it only with my Win 7 working Rig that's not gonna be a huge issue. (and I know this software target works with ESXi 4.1, which might be useful at a later point)

If you have any suggestions about the build, the RAID setup or anything else, i'd be happy to hear them.

 

[houkouonchi]

Not sure how good those drives are for raid compatability but you will be happy with the ARC-1882 performance. I tested with 24x3TB and the card could read *and* write just under 2 gigabytes/sec in raid6. Very fast.

 

[Zakari]

I can't find any decent review for this controller, the 2 I found were made with SSDs (I need mass storage, not "undecent" speeds, anywhere near 500M/s sequential read/write will fill up the quad nic link ...)

Concerning the drive, there's been a lot of builds made with the HD204UI (found posts about that in here) and it should work fine.

 

[houkouonchi]

I can't find any decent review for this controller, the 2 I found were made with SSDs (I need mass storage, not "undecent" speeds, anywhere near 500M/s sequential read/write will fill up the quad nic link ...)

Concerning the drive, there's been a lot of builds made with the HD204UI (found posts about that in here) and it should work fine.

Well I didn't do much of a 'review' but I did do some benching with large arrays of mechanical drives on the internal version:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...w-speed-King&p=4978906&viewfull=1#post4978906

 

[Blackdragon]

You might consider this setup:

LSI MegaRAID SATA/SAS 9260-4i or the 8i if you want a couple extra ports.
Intel RES2SV240 Plug-in Card SAS RAID Controller

vs the single card. Still gets you 20 ports and costs about 1/2 as much. From personal experience the solution works very well.

 

[Zakari]

I'll go for an dual core ROC for the parity calculation performance. (so either Areca 1882 or LSI 9265)

The SAS expander does seem nice, not sure about its compatibility with those boards.

I'm a lot more interested in the Areca IX version because it can be upgraded easily in terms of cache, and already has an external port for future extension.