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Replacement NAS

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luudee:
I have built a NAS a few years ago, I opted for a HW RAID controller.
I chose a Avago MegaRAID SAS 9361-16i, as I felt it had the most
space for future upgrades. Yes, it added about $1K to total cost, but
totally worth it in my opinion.

I also installed a Intel 10G X550T ethernet card.

I changed all FANs to Noctua high performance FANs.

Running ubuntu, not very optimized but it does it job quite well.

Attached are some pics of my monster !

Cheers,
rudi

David Hess:

--- Quote from: luudee on April 15, 2024, 02:36:35 pm ---I have built a NAS a few years ago, I opted for a HW RAID controller.
I chose a Avago MegaRAID SAS 9361-16i, as I felt it had the most
space for future upgrades. Yes, it added about $1K to total cost, but
totally worth it in my opinion.
--- End quote ---

I have had good results with the Areca RAID controllers that I have used.  I was originally planning on moving all of my bulk storage to a separate TrueNAS system when I built my Ryzen workstation, but instead upgraded my hardware RAID to an Areca 1680IX with 8x14TB drives in RAID6, plus a couple of 2TB RAID10 volumes.

I like being able to boot the system from the RAID controllers, hence the two 2TB RAID10 volumes, but Windows sometimes gets into a mode after updates that breaks booting from a volume that requires added drivers, so I am looking more favorably on a dumb controller and Storage Spaces because it is easier to replace the drives to increase the storage.

I tested booting and operating from 4 SATA SSDs in hardware RAID10 and it was not any faster.  It doubled the storage and added redundancy, but had other disadvantages.  The hardware RAID controllers are not fast enough to take good advantage of SSDs.

luudee:

--- Quote from: David Hess on April 15, 2024, 02:58:49 pm ---
--- Quote from: luudee on April 15, 2024, 02:36:35 pm ---I have built a NAS a few years ago, I opted for a HW RAID controller.
I chose a Avago MegaRAID SAS 9361-16i, as I felt it had the most
space for future upgrades. Yes, it added about $1K to total cost, but
totally worth it in my opinion.
--- End quote ---

I have had good results with the Areca RAID controllers that I have used.  I was originally planning on moving all of my bulk storage to a separate TrueNAS system when I built my Ryzen workstation, but instead upgraded my hardware RAID to an Areca 1680IX with 8x14TB drives in RAID6, plus a couple of 2TB RAID10 volumes.

I like being able to boot the system from the RAID controllers, hence the two 2TB RAID10 volumes, but Windows sometimes gets into a mode after updates that breaks booting from a volume that requires added drivers, so I am looking more favorably on a dumb controller and Storage Spaces because it is easier to replace the drives to increase the storage.

I tested booting and operating from 4 SATA SSDs in hardware RAID10 and it was not any faster.  It doubled the storage and added redundancy, but had other disadvantages.  The hardware RAID controllers are not fast enough to take good advantage of SSDs.

--- End quote ---

Hi David,

yeah, for that exact reason, Windows is VERBOTEN in my office !  >:D

Cheers,
rudi

nctnico:

--- Quote from: David Hess on April 15, 2024, 02:58:49 pm ---I tested booting and operating from 4 SATA SSDs in hardware RAID10 and it was not any faster.  It doubled the storage and added redundancy, but had other disadvantages.  The hardware RAID controllers are not fast enough to take good advantage of SSDs.

--- End quote ---
No surprise there  ;D . I have a 4 lane M.2 PCIe SSD in my PC. It shows a transfer rate of 1GB/s when reading. I doubt there are any cheap RAID controllers which support that kind of throughput. IMHO RAID as in having disks in parallel is only useful to increase throughput from hard drives (with spinning disks).

Berni:
Yeah hardware RAID controller cards are not a very good idea anymore.

They are just another potential point of failure, and when they do fail you are in for a world of hurt getting things running again. The striping on your drives might not be just simply compatible with some other RAID card you might have laying around, so you better swap it with an identical one. Then you have to set it up correctly to recognize the array correctly again, if you do something particularly stupid and have it attempt an array rebuild with wrong configuration it might even nuke your data...etc

And what do you get for using a RAID card? Usually it is performance. However these days drives have evolved and CPUs are much more powerful, so in a lot of cases it is actually SLOWER to use a hardware RAID card. You can get very good performance from software RAID solutions these days. Just buy a simple SAS HBA card and throw a ZFS array at those drives on a modern CPU and you will be getting plenty of performance. No hardware configuration needed either, the HBA card can be replaced with any other HBA card by just sticking it in and booting the machine up, as long as the OS can find the drive it just works. All of this is performant enough to saturate a 10G connection.

If you are going for speed then go for NVME SSDs, you can get 5000MB/s from a single drive, so no RAID even needed to go fast. And if you do have a crazy 100G home LAN network then you can still RAID multiple together and actually saturate such a connection. If you can afford 100G networking then you can afford the SSDs and a server capable of pushing those bytes around fast enough.

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