Question Is there an HDD controller that supports 3 x drives per SATA III port ?

[FreeBee101]

Is there a controller of any type that allows 3 x drives per SATA III port? Either something that goes between a drive and a mobo's Sata connectors or a specialized card.

If you have Seagate exos drives and assume they do 240mb/s max. Couldn't an external controller control them before the port somehow and allow the port to act as a large receiver or a specialized card to deal with the unusual data.

Example: (weird example)
I'm calling this a raid 20. A raid with one mirror stripe and two read write stripes. IE, 3x read 2x write per drive stack.

192tb of storage across 8x3 drives for 24 drives.

Write speed: 240mb/sx2x8 = 3.840gb/s
Read speed: 240mb/sx3x8 = 5.760gb/s

I'm assuming there isn't software for this atm. But it could be nice for more robust drive setups potentially. And if you could keep adding layers you could keep increasing the write speed and shrinking the difference between read/write speeds.

This of course at the low low price of 12k in exos drives to start with. 8)

 

[BFG-9000]

While technically SATA is a bus rather than a port, there isn't normally a way to identify a SATA drive as say master or slave to put more than one drive on a cable.

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) gets around this by letting you assign a SCSI ID to each drive. You could use SATA drives on a SAS controller by use of a SATA interposer which takes care of the SCSI ID, but SATA is only half-duplex while actual SAS drives are full-duplex so for best performance you would instead just use SAS drives, especially if you were buying new Seagate Exos drives anyway.

 

[FreeBee101]

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https://www.microchip.com/en-us/sol...ter-solutions/technologies/24g-sas-technology

Is there a way to make this controller, or similar, use the 3x 4.0 NVME slots as the throughput to the HDD's instead of the PCIE slot? I'm not sure if these kinds of cards have a bypass ability like this.

And if you had a 3 layer raid(like a 3 layer raid 10?!) Could each of the slots be used to each layer for maximum access? Still can't find if there is a raid to maximize throughput to the drives somehow. Is there a striping method so it doesn't drop speeds to only one drive at a time. My normal raid 10 seems to do this and easily only uses one drive at a time instead of writing to all drives at once.

IE, Is there a way to get a 192 terabyte drives setup up to the full 24 gB/s / 192gb/s? Are there going to be drives that do the full 24gbit/s speed?

And/or is there a way to get a double striped raid 10 with one mirror for double write abilities?

IE, A raid 10 with a second stripe of the same size. I'm assuming you can only do this with a second mirror and need 4 drives layers(2 raid 10's in a raid 10 or stripe) to increase the write speed without increasing the storage.

I was hoping there was a solution with 3 layers of raid 8 drives with double write and triple read. Or could you stripe two raids together as a mirror with a third stripe as the actual raid 10?

Or could you... 8xstripe mirrored to a second 8xstripe. Then that entire 16 disk array formed into a raid 10 with a third stripe of 8 disks? Or would that still require 4 stripes to get double write. This is hurting my brain.

I guess the simple answer is to just do a normal raid 10. But is there a way to use the 2 pci4.0 nvme slots as a bypass since this board is PCIE 3.0?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Specifically, why RAID? What do you hope to gain?

If this is a home system there is absolutely no need or reason for RAID.

 

[BFG-9000]

Since you have moved on from a 5 figure setup to a 6 figure one, I will suggest you use some of that budget on a professional to configure your SAN for you.

I mean nobody does this unless they really need the performance, redundancy and availability--so paying someone who knows what they are doing to ensure that would be a no-brainer.

 

[USAFRet]

If actually financed and built, what will this be used for?