Building a new supersystem with raid (advice appreciated)

speedydown

Hello everyone,

Okay, so I have just ordered a Lian Li v2000 plus II case and a Zalman 1000watt hp PSU. I need at least 4tb of storage but want good data transfer rates. I have thought about buying 10x 750gb western digital re2 drives (WD7500AYYS) as they supposed to be the fastest (96mb/s ave) and the most reliable on the market, YOUR VIEWS PLEASE?

I was looking at running 7 drives in a raid 6 as database and 3 drives in 0 as o/s?

For the RAID card I have narrowed it down to areca or 3ware. I have decided to go for 3ware as I have read that the areca 12*1 series and 1680's supposed to have a lot of bugs in them? I have also read that after sales support is no good??

I am going to get the 3ware 9650se/ml 12 port , unless anyone can convince me otherwise? I have looked at the sas cards for a while now but have decided against this as the sas drives are really expensive and the cards only support 8 ports. I know the cards will support upto 128 drives but has anyone ever tried buying a sas expander board? All you can get is a kind of NAS arrangement which is no good to me as I want to keep everything in the same case???

The motherboard.. I want something with at least 1000mhz memory and say 3 x pci-e x 16 lanes, any ideas??

CPU: I was thinking about the Q6600 as these can be had for a good price?

Graphics: I am looking at crossfiring 2x X800's ?

Any views/advise on this would be most appreciated

Thanks

Leonardo

I don't quite follow you. Motherboards don't have memory. Were you referring to front side bus? You should be looking for 1066 or 1333 FSB, which would be Intel chipset P35 or X38.

I can't advise you on RAID cards. I don't mess with RAID anymore.

Why would you want 2 X X800? Even a current mid-range card in single mode would outperform two 800s in Crossfire. Crossfire and SLI, even though they employ two video cards, do not double the the performance. The increase is only 10 - 15%. Why not an 8800GT or an ATI 3850 or 3870? The 3850 is close to the 8800 (GT, GTS, GT super duper - can't keep track of them) but is considerably less expensive.

I am not aware of any motherboards with 3 X PCI-e 16 lanes, but that doesn't mean they aren't available.

The Q6600 will handle anything you can throw at it.

How will you employ this system? What will be it's typical use? What will be its highest demands?

Thrax

What is your budget? Lay down how much storage space you require, and how you want it to be RAIDed, and we'll do the rest.

speedydown

Hello Leonardo,

I meant I want a mobo that supports at least 1000 fsb, and as far as sli/crossfire is concerned I am 2 years behind...lol. Are you better off spending more on the one card rather than buy two? I figured 3 x pci e x 16 as 2 would be needed for the graphics and one for the raid card.

At present I have 1.7 tb of data and have ran out of storage. I want a system that has least 4tb+ of storage that is fast and most importantly reliable. There will not be high demands all of the time, nor will the system be running 24/7, I just want something that is going to be good and reliable for years to come.....


Hello Thrax,

I need at least 4tb and am willing to spend around £1500 ($2900) on the raid card + drives.

I was looking at raid 6 for its reliability properties.

Thanks

Leonardo

You don't need PCI-e slots for RAID cards. I would imagine RAID cards are now available in PCI-e format, but the good old PCI format is alive and well. A high quality PCI RAID card would serve you very well.

If you are a top 5% gamer and absolutely want the best gaming performance, no holds barred, then yes, an $800 SLI setup is for you. You can get 85-90% of that performance with a single 8800 or 3850 video card. I have no idea what your gaming capabilities are. Yes, for most gamers, it's a better performance/cost proposition to buy a single, competitive card. Rule of thumb is that a single, newer card will outperform a Crossfire/SLI configuration composed of the previous generation's cards.

I'll let someone else advise you on the RAID mode. I just know to runaway from RAID 0 as fast as you can. It just begs for disaster.

speedydown

Thanks for that, although I will say that the standard pci bottlenecks at around 133mb/s thats why sata raid pci x 8 is a must when buying a modern raid card.

The standard pci would bottleneck on the 2nd raided hdd.....

I am running a 3 hdd raid 0 at present and know I am skating on thin ice...

Thrax

While I look, a good Areca raid card with an x8 PCIe chip is the way to go with the kind of HD subsystem you're looking to run.

Leonardo

I'm a little behind in the PCI-e arena myself. Lots traditional PCI add-ons are now appearing in PCI-e format.

speedydown

Thrax wrote:

While I look, a good Areca raid card with an x8 PCIe chip is the way to go with the kind of HD subsystem you're looking to run.

I agree but, have you not heard about the bugs in the 1231, 1261, ect and the fact that areca don't want to know when it comes to customer support?

I know the areca performs better on the performance tests but I am after reliability/stability and performance. Have you had many experiences with areca/3ware? I am relatively new to the game and only have Google as my friend lol!

kryyst

What is the function of this machine going to be? Seems to me that what your building is a complete waste in any function in how your designing it. For a gaming rig it's a waste. For a CAD/3d rendering machine, again your going about it wrong. For a server, totally going about it wrong. As it looks right now your just building a big box that can do anything you want. But not as efficiently as designing a purposely built machine which also typically means your spedning way to much to do it.

There is some old adage here about fools and there money that seems appropriate.

speedydown

kryyst wrote:

What is the function of this machine going to be? Seems to me that what your building is a complete waste in any function in how your designing it. For a gaming rig it's a waste. For a CAD/3d rendering machine, again your going about it wrong. For a server, totally going about it wrong. As it looks right now your just building a big box that can do anything you want. But not as efficiently as designing a purposely built machine which also typically means your spedning way to much to do it.

There is some old adage here about fools and there money that seems appropriate.

Okay, primarily my issue is that I need more storage, but I also want it to perform well given the fact that the main bottle-neck in a computer today is hdd speed, raid is the only way forward... Like I said before I want it to be reliable. Lets say I bought 2 x 1 tb external drives, firstly I have to plug them in (there external) then secondly if they go tits up I have lost all data. I am big time into games and want good performance on that spectrum.

As far as wasting money is concerned : Please recommend an alternative setup that has good performance/reliability with 4tb+

The function of the machine will be used for hd rendering, video encoding, high end gaming and data storage.

kryyst

Build a smaller leaner primary machine with 2x500gb in a raid 1 if you really are that worried about primary data loss. Then set up a NAS. Doesn't have to be anything special spec wise as long as you make sure you have a giga card in each machine. Put in 4x1tb drives and don't worry about redundancy for them. Just store your data on them and you'll have plenty of signs if any trouble arrives and then you can, should you need to back-off the data.

Simple as that. It'll keep your costs down. It'll mean that when you need to upgrade your primary rig you don't have to worry about any thing else. Just make your main rig a mean little work horse and keep your NAS chugging along in the background happily doing what it's designed to do. File storage, Webserving, email filtering, VOIP services. All that junk that you don't need running on your gaming rig.