Internal or External RAID Setup??
jedihobbit
Central Virginia, USA New
Okay here I am again trying to figure out what would be the most effective use of hardware as I continually re-arrange things.
I currently have 4 x WD 1TB WD1002FAEX SATA 6GB/S hard drives that need a home for server / storage duties. As stated in several places the idea is to run RAID1 (mirrored?) which I guess would be using two drives for each. Now I need to know if there is any advantage to doing a stand alone box such as a Sans Digital TowerRAID TR4M-B - 4 Bay (http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid/tr4mb.html) or some thing like a “ICY DOCK MB454SPF-B 4 in 3 SATA I, II & III Hot-Swap Internal Backplane Raid Cage†(http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=50) or even their 5 in 4 unit.
With the big switcharoo that I’ve done with which WC’ed box is doing what, if I go with the internal option if would be in the old full tower build I’m calling Celtic Spirit. The basic specs for that would be:
MOBO: MSI 890GXM-E65
CPU: 1055T w/ EK-Supreme HF High Flow – Nickel-Plex
GPUs: 2 x XFX GTX 285 w/ EK-FC285 GTX - Nickel / Plexi
MEMORY: G.SKILL F3-16000CL9D-4GBPIS 4GB 2X2GB
So some things to consider are:
1. The external box I’m looking at is only rated at a SATA II (3Gb/s) transfer rate while the WDs are SATAIII (6Gb/s).
2. I believe the mobo’s RAID controller is rated at 6Gb/s.
3. However as it now stands there would be 1 x optical drive, 1 x 32GB SSD, and one other SATA HDD of some sort. The mobo has six SATA ports.
4. The external box has a “Host interface: eSATA with Port Multiplier†to allow for eSATA or usb 2.0 interface.
So there you have it, any suggestions?
I currently have 4 x WD 1TB WD1002FAEX SATA 6GB/S hard drives that need a home for server / storage duties. As stated in several places the idea is to run RAID1 (mirrored?) which I guess would be using two drives for each. Now I need to know if there is any advantage to doing a stand alone box such as a Sans Digital TowerRAID TR4M-B - 4 Bay (http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid/tr4mb.html) or some thing like a “ICY DOCK MB454SPF-B 4 in 3 SATA I, II & III Hot-Swap Internal Backplane Raid Cage†(http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=50) or even their 5 in 4 unit.
With the big switcharoo that I’ve done with which WC’ed box is doing what, if I go with the internal option if would be in the old full tower build I’m calling Celtic Spirit. The basic specs for that would be:
MOBO: MSI 890GXM-E65
CPU: 1055T w/ EK-Supreme HF High Flow – Nickel-Plex
GPUs: 2 x XFX GTX 285 w/ EK-FC285 GTX - Nickel / Plexi
MEMORY: G.SKILL F3-16000CL9D-4GBPIS 4GB 2X2GB
So some things to consider are:
1. The external box I’m looking at is only rated at a SATA II (3Gb/s) transfer rate while the WDs are SATAIII (6Gb/s).
2. I believe the mobo’s RAID controller is rated at 6Gb/s.
3. However as it now stands there would be 1 x optical drive, 1 x 32GB SSD, and one other SATA HDD of some sort. The mobo has six SATA ports.
4. The external box has a “Host interface: eSATA with Port Multiplier†to allow for eSATA or usb 2.0 interface.
So there you have it, any suggestions?
0
Comments
I'd always opt for internal. If you go external and use USB, you're going to be severely limited in your speed by the max speed of USB. If you go with eSATA it won't be as bad but you'll probably still not get the full throughput. Also, if you have 4 drives, why not go for RAID10 (a RAID0 stripe over RAID1 arrays). You get the same redundancy as RAID 1 but you also get a speed increase since you're striping the data over 2 arrays. You also have one large physical volume to work with instead of two smaller volumes. Not that 1T is really small... but you see what I mean.
I prefer internal, but there's nothing wrong with SAS cabled external. (SAS is typically used as a concentrator method for >4 SATA or SAS devices.) Just make sure if you go SAS external that it's a SAS+SATA and not a SAS. They use the same connectors.
As far as software raid; if the system's on a UPS then it's a non-issue. If the system is NOT on a UPS then any time you have an unexpected shutdown, there'll be corruption and potential data loss. Hardware RAID has the option of battery backed cache and non-volatile cache (very high end only) to prevent this issue.
Actually meaning "absolutely out of your price range." ~$900 entry level. Battery is the way to go there; virtually every Areca card offers battery as an option thankfully.
Actually, it depends on the tool. Most trade off safety for performance by using system memory as a cache with no read/write biasing. Which means you can fill cache with writes, lose power, and lose all that data. Windows 2k3 and 2k8R2 don't make this stupid mistake, nor does FreeBSD or FreeNAS. Everybody else does though. Something to bear in mind. Realistically any 'server' should be on UPS regardless of attached storage though.
Oh and this would be somewhere in the mix power wise........http://www.amazon.com/Ultra-ULT33046-2000-1200-Backup/dp/B000GC98H8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303952338&sr=8-1 :bigggrin:
The big difference between those two is in the connectors. 4 SATA ports for the internal and it appears that it is just a plate that passes through SATA, not performing any of the RAID work, where as the external enclosure is actually handling RAID functionality and you use a PCI-E 1x slot.
yes, but if you are installing XP (why?) you would need to load the SATA driver during setup.
Actually am finally migrating to 64bit Win7.