Internal or External RAID Setup??

jedihobbitjedihobbit Central Virginia, USA New
edited April 2011 in Hardware
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?

Comments

  • jedihobbitjedihobbit Central Virginia, USA New
    edited April 2011
    Oh boy just remembered a very important part of this deal……as a server would the HDDs in the external be accessible on a network through the computer it is attached to??
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited April 2011
    You could make the external array accessible to the network the same way you would with any other hard drive. Just need to set up your preferred form of sharing and permissions, etc.

    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.
  • jedihobbitjedihobbit Central Virginia, USA New
    edited April 2011
    Okay if I go internal what happens control wise with 7 - 8 devices and only 6 ports?
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited April 2011
    Ah... I missed that part. You'd need to get another SATA controller card. For the absolute best performance, you would want a hardware SATA RAID controller, though just getting a standard SATA card and doing software RAID is pretty much fine as well these days.
  • RootWyrmRootWyrm Icrontian
    edited April 2011
    Don't worry about SATAII vs. SATAIII either. They're mechanical disks. They can't saturate SATAII even on sequential loads.

    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.
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited April 2011
    "very high end" of course meaning most likely out of your price range. Most software RAID tools are quite good at handling power loss these days. Yes, you might lose the data that was being written to the disk right when the power was lost, but that's no different than what would happen with a single drive setup.
  • RootWyrmRootWyrm Icrontian
    edited April 2011
    ardichoke wrote:
    "very high end" of course meaning most likely out of your price range.

    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.
    Most software RAID tools are quite good at handling power loss these days. Yes, you might lose the data that was being written to the disk right when the power was lost, but that's no different than what would happen with a single drive setup.

    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.
  • jedihobbitjedihobbit Central Virginia, USA New
    edited April 2011
    Okay.............think I understand. :hair: Anyway did either of you look at the linked items so a to give me an opinion of those particular "sub-systems"??

    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:
  • TushonTushon I'm scared, Coach Alexandria, VA Icrontian
    edited April 2011
    Presuming you have the room and the SATA ports, prefer internal to external and that UPS will certainly do the trick.

    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.
  • jedihobbitjedihobbit Central Virginia, USA New
    edited April 2011
    With the issue of only having six mobo SATA headers (with the usual mystery as to why on 4 function) tripped accross an old PCI SATA 150 card. That could be used for the optical drive and maybe the secondary HDD (behind the SSD)? Then again if I'm doing RAID internally (4 x) then that would leave the last two ports for the systems HDDs...........
  • TushonTushon I'm scared, Coach Alexandria, VA Icrontian
    edited April 2011
    jedihobbit wrote:
    with the usual mystery as to why on 4 function
    ...
    I'm doing RAID internally (4 x) then that would leave the last two ports for the systems HDD
    Check BIOS, usually last two are off by default and you have to turn them on and be using a specific driver to let them function within OS normally.

    yes, but if you are installing XP (why?) you would need to load the SATA driver during setup.
  • jedihobbitjedihobbit Central Virginia, USA New
    edited April 2011
    Tushon wrote:
    Check BIOS, usually last two are off by default and you have to turn them on and be using a specific driver to let them function within OS normally.

    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. :crazy:
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