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Looking to build a TB+ array for file storage

S

Slacker

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 29, 2000
Messages
6,762
It's come to my attention that even between 5 machines in our house we're running out of space. Most of it is digital media of one form or another. My roomates and I just invested in a gigabit switch as well as NICs because we were having some problems streaming off the current file server, now it's time to upgrade the storage. Currently it has a 200GB drive but that's almost full as is my laptop's external 250, and most of my desktop's 400. My roomate's computers are about the same.

We'e probably got about 50-100GB of duplicated files but that still leaves 600GB+ of files spread out over several machines. So I think it's time to invest in a TB+ RAID 5 array. I haven't really kept up on hardware much in the last few years. The last time I did any real upgrading was when I bought a 250GB SATA drive for my desktop, that was a few months after they came out. Now I see there's SATA II, NCQ, and a bunch of other things I haven't heard of.

We're trying to figure out what will give us the performance and reliability we need without costing an exorbitant amount or being obsolete in 6 months. I'd like to stick with 3ware for the RAID card (unless someone can convince me otherwise) but I'm not really sure which model or which hard drives to put in it. The price break seems to be at 320 right now and 3 of those would be about a TB. But more drives in RAID 5 = more speed. And hard drives invariably get filled up, it's just a matter of time. So I need some help figuring out what controller and drives to get. Our file server is an older Duron based machine, I can't recall what chipset offhand but it's just got standard PCI slots. I figure if we're gonna be going with SATA (or SATA II) then we'll probably want PCI-E or PCI-X.

This is all kind of a slipperly slope though, if we get a PCI-X controller we'll need a new motherboard that supports that, and probably a new power supply to power the drives, probably a new processor too since I'm running a P4 3.2 and my roomate is running a 2GHz Athlon.
 
I have felt the same situation. Figure out how much storage you are using right now, triple it, and buy that much. You can always add more storage to your array later on.
 
You won't really need pci-x/pci-e for a file server raid controller on a home network, unless you're running gigabit for all your systems. 100mbit networks only max out at about 12.5 MB a second if you don't factor in overhead.
 
You will probably want to review the Terabyte Club at the top of this forum. There's a lot of rigs in there that are pretty close to what you envision, and they've actually done it :)

SuperMicro makes server boards for desktop chips, allowing you to use a P4/Celeron and unbuffered RAM with PCI-X expansion cards, dramatically reducing the cost of entry to PCI-X. Also, an SLI mobo may work with a PCI-E RAID card, if you want to be the guinea pig on that :eek:

As for the drives, you are correct that drives in the 250-320GB are the most cost effective right now. You will probably want an eight port card, as four ports is pretty cramped especially if you want to run a hot spare. Pick up an 80GB, or use a drive lying around, boot drive to reduce the load on the RAID. As long as you are under 2TB, you won't need to do any file system or partitioning tricks.
 
defakto said:
You won't really need pci-x/pci-e for a file server raid controller on a home network, unless you're running gigabit for all your systems. 100mbit networks only max out at about 12.5 MB a second if you don't factor in overhead.
Click to expand...

We just went out and upgraded our switch and all our systems to Gigabit. 100mbit just wasn't cutting it sometimes. I think it was the switch, since we were streaming video that was only a few hundred k a second and it would still stutter sometimes. But only on one machine. Upgrading to gigabit fixed that. Although we'e still got to run some more wires 'cause my two systems are still stuck using a 100mbit switch since we've only got one cable long enough to reach my room.

I've been looking at the 3ware 9550SX-8LP, it's about $500 but it supports Online Capacity Expansion. So if we're ever running low on space we can pop another drive or two in without needing to rebuild the array from scratch. The 9500S-8LP is about the same price http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816116026 and uses PCI 2.2. We'd probably want to still upgrade the motherboard for something with 64 bit/66Mhz slots if not PCI-X.

I'm still totally lost on drives. With an 8 port card we can stand to go with something smaller to still get the space, probably 250 at the least. There only seems to be a handfull of SATA II drives out at the moment, is the extra price worth it?
 
9550 doesn't fit in normal pci slots. I'd go with the Highpoint 1820/2220.

I assume you're using Windows for the file server? If it is linux, beware samba - the speeds are nothing like good. Even on fairly recent hardware, I only get 4 MB/s transfers reading/writing a single file. I've done various benchmarks, and the only slowdown is samba. The network's faster than that, the disks are faster, the processors are faster, and samba bogs the whole thing down.

 
PCI-X cards do ususally work in PCI slots. Just at a performance penalty. (still higher performance then that Highpoint though)

==>Lazn
 
unhappy_mage said:
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=9550sx4lp&page=3
No, I mean it doesn't fit. It doesn't have the three notches it'd need to fit in a normal PCI slot. And as tired as I get of posting this review, tweakers.net's review of 32 raid cards shows the highpoint doing very well, especially at its price point. If I wanted hardware raid (or at least semi-hardware...), I'd be all over it. Page 9 shows the card, with its three notches in the right places for use in normal PCI slots.

Click to expand...

Ah, my bad.

==>Lazn
 
I see there's PCI-X x16 and PCI-X x4 or x1, which one will the 9550 require? Any recommendations on a cheap mobo/processor combo with the right PCI-X slot would be great too. The RAID controller will handle most of the processing so there's no need to get a high end processor/board combo.

I'm looking at these drives http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101253 and http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101567 Figure 4 to start out with and we can always add more later. Anyone had any experience with these in a RAID 5 array? 400GB would be nice http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148063 but it's about 25% more per GB
 
Slacker said:
I see there's PCI-X x16 and PCI-X x4 or x1, which one will the 9550 require? Any recommendations on a cheap mobo/processor combo with the right PCI-X slot would be great too. The RAID controller will handle most of the processing so there's no need to get a high end processor/board combo.
Click to expand...

Be careful here, PCI-X and PCI-Express are not the same thing. PCI-Express slots come in x16, x8, x4, and x1 versions. Just to be sure, did you mean PCI-Express? (You can abbreviate it to PCI-E or PCE) PCI-X devices come in 64-bit connectors that run at up to 133MHz and are backward compatible with conventional PCI, PCI-E is a new, serial interface that is not physically compatible with PCI or PCI-X.
 
DougLite said:
You will probably want to review the Terabyte Club at the top of this forum. There's a lot of rigs in there that are pretty close to what you envision, and they've actually done it :)

SuperMicro makes server boards for desktop chips, allowing you to use a P4/Celeron and unbuffered RAM with PCI-X expansion cards, dramatically reducing the cost of entry to PCI-X. Also, an SLI mobo may work with a PCI-E RAID card, if you want to be the guinea pig on that :eek:

As for the drives, you are correct that drives in the 250-320GB are the most cost effective right now. You will probably want an eight port card, as four ports is pretty cramped especially if you want to run a hot spare. Pick up an 80GB, or use a drive lying around, boot drive to reduce the load on the RAID. As long as you are under 2TB, you won't need to do any file system or partitioning tricks.
Click to expand...

Ditto on what you said DougLite.

I've been kicking around the idea of doing this myself and have come close to putting together what I plan on getting. What I've spec'ed out was 250GB SATA drives. SATA II does have NCQ but for a regular file server you're probably not going to see any difference and why pay the premium per drive? You may also want to consider picking up a couple of these or something similar:
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817119403

The drives are going to need cooling and you're going to need a way to mount them. Two of these would take up all four 5.25 drives but you'd be able to fit 6 drives in that area alone not including the internal HD bays. The only time you'd need a CD/DVD is the install of the OS. With the 3ware card you selected, you could replace the drives easily enough this way.

If you're interested I could email you my Newegg wishlist of parts. I plan on reusing a P4 1.5Ghz chip I have laying around.
 
Slacker said:
I see there's PCI-X x16 and PCI-X x4 or x1, which one will the 9550 require? Any recommendations on a cheap mobo/processor combo with the right PCI-X slot would be great too. The RAID controller will handle most of the processing so there's no need to get a high end processor/board combo.
Click to expand...

as UICompE02 said PCI-X is NOT PCI-Express, totally different slot.

==>Lazn
 
The 3ware 9550SX http://3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9000.asp which is the card I'm looking at uses a 64-bit/133MHz interface, so I assume that means PCI-X. So is there just one PCI-X standard? Then multiple PCI-E standards?

The board we've got now has standard PCI slots, I'm assuming there would be quite a performance hit by using a PCI-X card in a PCI slot. Then again the Gigabit NIC is PCI so would that be the bottleneck anyways? I'm not familiar with all the bus speeds of the various PCI standards.
 
Although most PCI-X cards work in regular PCI slots, these 3Ware cards do NOT, as they do not have the edge connector notch that indicated 5V signalling support. PCI-X only for 3Ware 9500 series, sorry.
 
What about using the new SATA RAID PCI Express Cards? I forget what brand I was looking at awhile back but they have lots of bandwith and you can get a new motherboard with a Pentium 4 socket T motherboard with 2 slots. Each card holds I think 8 drives.

Lots of upgrade room.

Put it in a big, cool case.
 
Asgorath said:
What about using the new SATA RAID PCI Express Cards? I forget what brand I was looking at awhile back but they have lots of bandwith and you can get a new motherboard with a Pentium 4 socket T motherboard with 2 slots. Each card holds I think 8 drives.

Lots of upgrade room.

Put it in a big, cool case.
Click to expand...

Most of the cards I looked at require a PCI-E 4x slot which I know DFI's come with one but I don't know of any others with more than one. They also cost A LOT more than their PCI-X counterparts.

I guess in theory you could use an SLI motherboard as both 16X slots would get 8x to each, and pop the RAID card in the second "video" slot. Anyone care to test it? :D
 
unhappy_mage said:
9550 doesn't fit in normal pci slots. I'd go with the Highpoint 1820/2220.

I assume you're using Windows for the file server? If it is linux, beware samba - the speeds are nothing like good. Even on fairly recent hardware, I only get 4 MB/s transfers reading/writing a single file. I've done various benchmarks, and the only slowdown is samba. The network's faster than that, the disks are faster, the processors are faster, and samba bogs the whole thing down.

Click to expand...

Really? I find Samba faster at Windoze networking than Windoze! I am using Fedora Core 4 and HighPoint's 2220 SATA in raid 5.
 
The_Mage18 said:
I guess in theory you could use an SLI motherboard as both 16X slots would get 8x to each, and pop the RAID card in the second "video" slot. Anyone care to test it? :D
Click to expand...

I've actually done this before on a couple of systems without a problem. Doesn't mean it works with every implementation of SLI, but it's possible.

I tested it with an HP xw9300 workstation and Gigabyte SLI board -- I don't remember the exact model number.
 
After reviewing our finances (read: poor college students) I've started looking at some other options, right now this card seems to be in the lead http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16816115022. Basically it has all the features of the 3ware cards; RAID 5, support for 8 drives, Online Capacity Expansion, and at a little more then half the price. And assuming it's backwards compatible with a normal PCI slot we can get the card and 4-5 hard drives and get an array setup. Then we can always add the remaining drives and/or upgrade to a board/processor combo with PCI-X. 4 300/320GB drives, the card, and a new case comes out to about a grand and will last a few months at least, won't be quite a TB but with 8 drives in RAID 5 it should come out to about 2TB exactly.
 
Slacker said:
After reviewing our finances (read: poor college students) I've started looking at some other options, right now this card seems to be in the lead http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16816115022. Basically it has all the features of the 3ware cards; RAID 5, support for 8 drives, Online Capacity Expansion, and at a little more then half the price. And assuming it's backwards compatible with a normal PCI slot we can get the card and 4-5 hard drives and get an array setup. Then we can always add the remaining drives and/or upgrade to a board/processor combo with PCI-X. 4 300/320GB drives, the card, and a new case comes out to about a grand and will last a few months at least, won't be quite a TB but with 8 drives in RAID 5 it should come out to about 2TB exactly.
Click to expand...

I have this exact card, perfect if speed isn't your primary concern. It still maxes out a 100BT connection on writes with a 900MHZ PIII. I am currently running it under Fedora Core 4 with (4) 250Gig Seagate drives.
 
I have been looking around for last 2 weeks for the best of the best... this is what I have found...

for workstation:
Areca ARC-1120 PCI-X 64bit/133MHz SATA Controller Card (or ARC-1220 pci-e 8x)
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/html/pcix-sata.htm
&
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/743/SC743T-R760.cfm
as seen here: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=835271

for server:
Areca ARC-1160 PCI-X 64bit/133MHz SATA Controller Card (or ARC-1260 pci-e 8x)
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/html/pcix-sata.htm
&
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/3U/932/SC932T-R760.cfm
 
longblock454 said:
I have this exact card, perfect if speed isn't your primary concern. It still maxes out a 100BT connection on writes with a 900MHZ PIII. I am currently running it under Fedora Core 4 with (4) 250Gig Seagate drives.
Click to expand...

We've got gigabit but as long as it can handle 3 video streams simultaneously it should be enough. If you're running a P3 I assume that means you're using a normal PCI slot?
 
3 video streams should be absolutely no problem. Even a DVD is only 10 mbit/s; 30 mbit is a really low expectation. However, trying to burn a DVD over network at 8x will completely max out a 100mb connection; gigabit's not all that much more price-wise. In this instance it's probably not worth the hassle of setting up jumbo packets etc, but the extra speed from gbE should help a bit.

 
Slacker said:
We've got gigabit but as long as it can handle 3 video streams simultaneously it should be enough. If you're running a P3 I assume that means you're using a normal PCI slot?
Click to expand...

Yea, it works fine in a standard 32bit PCI slot. Are you reading or writing 3 video streams? I would assume reading 3 would be fine. I am happy to test mine if you can think of a suitable method?
 
longblock454 said:
Yea, it works fine in a standard 32bit PCI slot. Are you reading or writing 3 video streams? I would assume reading 3 would be fine. I am happy to test mine if you can think of a suitable method?
Click to expand...

How about HDtach?
 
I set up this very thing a few months ago:

3ware 9500S-8 Controller
Six 300GB Seagate 7200-8's in RAID 5 (one a ready-spare).
New 550 Antec TruePower 2.0 Power Supply.

Everything shipped from NewEgg was just over $1600.

I don't recommend you get drives from NewEgg though. Their packing of Hard Drives is deplorable. Mine are ok, but...

-Larry


Slacker said:
It's come to my attention that even between 5 machines in our house we're running out of space. Most of it is digital media of one form or another. My roomates and I just invested in a gigabit switch as well as NICs because we were having some problems streaming off the current file server, now it's time to upgrade the storage. Currently it has a 200GB drive but that's almost full as is my laptop's external 250, and most of my desktop's 400. My roomate's computers are about the same.

We'e probably got about 50-100GB of duplicated files but that still leaves 600GB+ of files spread out over several machines. So I think it's time to invest in a TB+ RAID 5 array. I haven't really kept up on hardware much in the last few years. The last time I did any real upgrading was when I bought a 250GB SATA drive for my desktop, that was a few months after they came out. Now I see there's SATA II, NCQ, and a bunch of other things I haven't heard of.

We're trying to figure out what will give us the performance and reliability we need without costing an exorbitant amount or being obsolete in 6 months. I'd like to stick with 3ware for the RAID card (unless someone can convince me otherwise) but I'm not really sure which model or which hard drives to put in it. The price break seems to be at 320 right now and 3 of those would be about a TB. But more drives in RAID 5 = more speed. And hard drives invariably get filled up, it's just a matter of time. So I need some help figuring out what controller and drives to get. Our file server is an older Duron based machine, I can't recall what chipset offhand but it's just got standard PCI slots. I figure if we're gonna be going with SATA (or SATA II) then we'll probably want PCI-E or PCI-X.

This is all kind of a slipperly slope though, if we get a PCI-X controller we'll need a new motherboard that supports that, and probably a new power supply to power the drives, probably a new processor too since I'm running a P4 3.2 and my roomate is running a 2GHz Athlon.
Click to expand...
 
The 9500S-8 works fine in most PCI slots. My server uses a spare Abit IT7-MAX-2 I had and it's been up and running flawlessly for over a month.

I'm seeing mixed views on the new 9550's. Not sure what to think yet.

-Larry

unhappy_mage said:
9550 doesn't fit in normal pci slots. I'd go with the Highpoint 1820/2220.

I assume you're using Windows for the file server? If it is linux, beware samba - the speeds are nothing like good. Even on fairly recent hardware, I only get 4 MB/s transfers reading/writing a single file. I've done various benchmarks, and the only slowdown is samba. The network's faster than that, the disks are faster, the processors are faster, and samba bogs the whole thing down.

Click to expand...
 
TechLarry said:
I set up this very thing a few months ago:

3ware 9500S-8 Controller
Six 300GB Seagate 7200-8's in RAID 5 (one a ready-spare).
New 550 Antec TruePower 2.0 Power Supply.

Everything shipped from NewEgg was just over $1600.

I don't recommend you get drives from NewEgg though. Their packing of Hard Drives is deplorable. Mine are ok, but...

-Larry
Click to expand...

Zipzoomfly has better prices on drives then newegg anyways, but I'll probably get the RAID controller from them. Still trying to decide between the Seagate 300GB or WD 320GB drives. 400's would be nice but the price difference is about 25% more on a per GB ratio.

Don't suppose anyone knows of any good deals on large SATA drives?
 
longblock454 said:
Yea, it works fine in a standard 32bit PCI slot. Are you reading or writing 3 video streams? I would assume reading 3 would be fine. I am happy to test mine if you can think of a suitable method?
Click to expand...


I have no doubts it will be able to handle the speed, the single ATA/100 200GB drive in our server now can handle 2 video streams now that we've upgraded to gigabit. The RAID 5 array will be more about reliability and space then speed.
 
Well my external 250GB drive just decided to take a shit on me. Luckily it looks like Ontrack can recover all of my data but I don't have anywhere to put it. So we've decided to start building the server a little early. Right now I've just ordered 1 WD Caviar RE2 WD4000YR 400GB http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produ...ctCode=101254-1 as a stopgab measure until prices fall a bit more. Then we'll pick up another 2-3 drives and the Highpoint 2220 controller. Probably a new case and PSU to power everything too. The additional 4 drives and a new mobo/cpu can wait another 6months at least unless the standard PCI slots ends up really hindering performance. I doubt it will though.
 
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