Hello
(I have already read through this old post from four years ago: RAID 1 PCIe M.2 NVMe Card?)
We're trying out Google's approach of buying a consumer grade machine as a replacement for a ten year old Xeon server as we need the maximum possible grunt from an 8-core CPU that we can get due to software licencing reasons, and the Xeons and EPYCs with 8 cores just clock too low.
We're going to be running Windows Server 2019 on an i9-9900K on a MSI Mag Z390 Tomahawk with 128GB of RAM (4x 32GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666 C16) and clocking it at 4.9 or 5GHz.
I've specified 1x Samsung 860 EVO SATA as the OS drive, and 2x Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe drives in RAID 1 as defined in the BIOS (not Windows) as the data drive. However, I'm having second thoughts and have some questions regarding how RAID might be handled on a consumer board:
Thank you
Andrew
EDIT: Added typical workloads to the end of the post.
(I have already read through this old post from four years ago: RAID 1 PCIe M.2 NVMe Card?)
We're trying out Google's approach of buying a consumer grade machine as a replacement for a ten year old Xeon server as we need the maximum possible grunt from an 8-core CPU that we can get due to software licencing reasons, and the Xeons and EPYCs with 8 cores just clock too low.
We're going to be running Windows Server 2019 on an i9-9900K on a MSI Mag Z390 Tomahawk with 128GB of RAM (4x 32GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666 C16) and clocking it at 4.9 or 5GHz.
I've specified 1x Samsung 860 EVO SATA as the OS drive, and 2x Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe drives in RAID 1 as defined in the BIOS (not Windows) as the data drive. However, I'm having second thoughts and have some questions regarding how RAID might be handled on a consumer board:
- If one of the NVMEs fail, because the RAID 1 is setup in the BIOS, should the one remaining drive carry on until we can replace the dead one? On server hardware, if a drive dies, one walks into the server room, pulls the drive from the server's chassis, plugs in a new one, and the drive backplane takes care of it, all without downtime. I'm not yet sure how to handle consumer motherboards like this.
- We're migrating from 1x 5400RPM HDDs in RAID 1 so ANY boost in performance would be VERY welcome. Given that, for more "server" like RAID behaviour in terms of RAID array reconstruction, perhaps an Intel RS3WC080 RAID card and changing to SATA SSDs in RAID 5? In terms of TB written, it appears that 70TB/year might be it, and drives like the Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SATA have a lifespan of 600TBW. The MSI Mag Z390 Tomahawk's specs say that it supports RAID 5 over SATA, so I'm not sure if the Intel RAID controller add in card is just going to be a waste of money.
Thank you
Andrew
EDIT: Added typical workloads to the end of the post.
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