[SOLVED] 4 (2TB) M.2 NVME SSD in Raid 10

[NateWright43]

Hello Forum, yes this is my first post and yes I have searched to no avail on the entire interwebs.

I am tasked with building a new Workstation for my company. We are small (~10 People) and this PC will have about 6 users currently. It will serve as our SolidWorks(SW) server and will contain all of our files from our projects and the SW software that runs it. I was asked to spec a 2k and 4k build. I think the 4k build is rather extreme but why the heck not.

My question is this: Can I use these 4 NVME SSD's as our storage. in Raid 10 we would have a total capacity of 4 TB and that is plenty for us. We will not be booting from this drive configuration as it will be storage only. We will at the very least be doing Raid 1 for the redundancy of our data, that we also backup. These are very important files.

Why this setup? Speed. We have the multiple users that need to access and write these files. The computer itself will be doing nothing but passing information from our personal workstations to the drives and vice versa. We mostly work on a local network and if we are remote we have a dedicated 50 MBPS up/down fiber line.

I want to avoid VROC and threadripper. So, is this possible? I will include the hardware I have spec'd below. Should the bios see these drives as any other drive? Does it matter that they are on a PCIE slot riser? Any help would be awesome. I am a mechanical engineer, but an amateur PC enthusiast that builds my own PC's at home.

CPU - intel i9-9900k
Mobo - ASUS WS z390 PRO
Mem - Corsair dominator platinum
stor - Samsung 970 evo plus (2TB)
M.2 ext - Asus Hyper m.2 x16 pcie OR Highpoint Tech SSD7101A-1

 

[USAFRet]

Yours is one of the few instances where a RAID with NVMe drive is a good idea.

I see no immediate issues with your concept and setup.

 

[NateWright43]

Okay, and Thanks! haha

Most if not all post I have seen talking about this are people asking " Why do you need that for gaming?" etc.

I just want to confirm as best I can it will work before I recommend it just to find out raid with NVME isn't possible. From what I can tell the issue really arrises when people try to boot from it, which we will not be.

 

[kanewolf]

RAID1 can protect against some things. But if these are "very important files", they need to exist in multiple logical locations. If one of those "very important files" gets deleted on your RAID1 both copies are instantly gone.
RAID is not a replacement for backups. Since you say you are backing it up, I would not waste the cost on RAID10. Go RAID0 and assume you restore.

 

[USAFRet]

Very good point about the 1 portion of the RAID 10.
If you have comprehensive backups, the RAID 1 is unneeded.

 

[NateWright43]

Okay, I will double check on that. My supervisor set that as a requirement since were are running that now with HDD's.

I will see how the backups are configured. I know we for sure back up the metadata for the files, but I will confirm the rest. What you are saying makes sense.

 

[USAFRet]

Okay, I will double check on that. My supervisor set that as a requirement since were are running that now with HDD's.

I will see how the backups are configured. I know we for sure back up the metadata for the files, but I will confirm the rest. What you are saying makes sense.

A RAID 1 gives you a fallback of now.

Full drive or full volume backups.
Multiple days, Full and Incremental, gives you the possibility of recovering from "last Tuesday". Such as in the case of a nasty alware or ransomware attack.

 

[NateWright43]

We have a full backup of 7 days for all of our data that is done during non operating hours.
So, while the 1 of the Raid 10 is probably redundant, it is nice to have that right now backup always there. We would like to have as little down time as possible.

 

[mdd1963]

Are said intended networked users of this fast storage solution already on a 10 GbE network? If not, they certainly need to be,

(Getting RAIDed NVME storage capable of 5000-6000 MB/sec sequential transfers is awesome and all, but, being then limited to only ~115 MB/sec reads/writes over a 1 Gbps network removes some of the proverbial wind from the sails of all those not physically using /editing on that particular system.)

 

[NateWright43]

Are said intended networked users of this fast storage solution already on a 10 GbE network? If not, they certainly need to be,

(Getting RAIDed NVME storage capable of 5000-6000 MB/sec sequential transfers is awesome and all, but, being then limited to only ~115 MB/sec reads/writes over a 1 Gbps network removes some of the proverbial wind from the sails of all those not physically using /editing on that particular system.)

I was thinking this as well. However, I did think that even if the network is slower than the read/write speeds, we should still technically see an improvement, even if it is too negligible to notice. So we then enter the are of diminishing returns.

So, I did this quick calculation, and I think it is correct. Most of the users are on the local network and are the ones who would see the most benefit over the remote users. Currently all of our workstations are connected to the network over a 5G wireless connection (with the option to wire directly into an Ethernet switch). The current and future server will also be connected to this network in the IT closet wired directly.

I pinged the server this morning (from my personal workstation on 5G) and sent 1000 KBytes. It then averaged a 2ms round trip time. Halving that time for the one way speed I calculated a speed of 1 Kbyte/s. This then converts to 8Gbits/s.

Does this seem sufficient? I in all honesty will probably just recommend an M.2 boot drive with sata SSD's for storage as it is more cost effective and will still be a giant upgrade for us. However, with my budget, why leave speed on the table if it can actually be used? lol

EDIT: I made a mistake in my calculation I think the correct number would be .008 Gb/s. So it seems it would not be worth it then?

EDIT2: I was going to post a pic, but my Wifi Status says ~650 Mbps. So I am not entirely sure how to determine what is good or not.

 

[USAFRet]

On my home LAN, from a SATA III SSD to the NAS box of 4x4TB spinning drives in RAID 5....that absolutely maxes out the gigabit LAN.
Where you will see a benefit is when multiple people are doing that at the same time.

 

[kanewolf]

Most of the users are on the local network and are the ones who would see the most benefit over the remote users. Currently all of our workstations are connected to the network over a 5G wireless connection

LARGE file transfers will be much higher performance with wired connectivity.
Look at your link rate for your WIFI connection. Divide that in half that is your effective throughput max on WIFI.