New NAS setup

[robertAP]

Hey,
I'm planning to build a NAS using the parts in this list:
[https://www.pccasegear.com/wish_lists/660647] (I alredy have HDDs and RAM.)

I'm not 100% sure on this controller card as I have not done a proper raid setup before. I don't need any raid features just to add extra SATA ports as the MOBO only has 4 SATA ports.

if I use this card with this cable [ http://bit.ly/2h2zJ0A ] (This is the cheapest I found) would everything work?

Planning on runnings in a windows environment, would I need additional software / special config?

Thanks for any advise or help.

 

[RealBeast]

Which Windows OS will you use, 8/10 and use Storage Spaces to create a large pool? Simple, mirrored or parity?

How many drives do you need?

Have you considered THIS card to expand the number of ports? It can be flashed with LSI firmware (as it is actually an LSI card) and is compatible with all sorts of OSs. I've seen it on occasion as low as $50 on EBay refurbished and have used it a number of FreeNAS builds. There are many good guides on the Internet on that card as it is very popular and inexpensive and can be flashed to a number of LSI card firmwares, like THIS.

The cable you linked would be the cable that you would need, an SFF-8087 to 4x SATA forward cable, with that type of card or any RAID card using 8087 for that matter.

 

[robertAP]

Which Windows OS will you use, 8/10 and use Storage Spaces to create a large pool? Simple, mirrored or parity?

How many drives do you need?

Have you considered THIS card to expand the number of ports? It can be flashed with LSI firmware (as it is actually an LSI card) and is compatible with all sorts of OSs. I've seen it on occasion as low as $50 on EBay refurbished and have used it a number of FreeNAS builds. There are many good guides on the Internet on that card as it is very popular and inexpensive and can be flashed to a number of LSI card firmwares, like THIS.

The cable you linked would be the cable that you would need, an SFF-8087 to 4x SATA forward cable, with that type of card or any RAID card using 8087 for that matter.

Windows 10 if it supports it. The page for the card did not have it listed.

I would use all 12 drive bays that the case supports. I currently have 8 drives for my storage with a mix of sizes from 300GB drives to 8TB drives in a mix of basic and dynamic.

They are currently jammed into an old pc running win 10 set as network shares.

That's pretty much what I want to do again. Is just have them show up in windows and just share them over the home group.

 

[RealBeast]

Okay, then yes the cable should work fine with that card.

Can't really comment on that card per se as I have not used it, I use Adaptec and LSI. W10 should support most PCIe cards of that type but you won't know 100% until you do it. I ran into the same issue a while back when I built a big RAID 5 array 8 x 8TB He drives and an Adaptec 8805 using a motherboard that wasn't "approved" but fortunately it all worked.

In any event insure that you use backup, as Storage Spaces is a real problem for recovery if it goes wrong.

 

[dgingeri]

It's really not that hard to use Linux for this purpose, saving yourself the licensing costs, especially if you use hardware RAID. Using software RAID under Linux is akin to using Windows Storage Spaces, and performs much better due to lower memory and processor overhead, but does take more effort.

https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/samba-server-ubuntu-16-04/

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-raid-arrays-with-mdadm-on-ubuntu-16-04

These skills can also be very handy for making a career in IT later on.

 

[RealBeast]

While I understand that you may want to use Windows for ease of use, I *really* like FreeNAS with ZFS if you do have the time and patience to do just a bit of learning and tinkering. In the meantime you learn Linux and get a very robust self data correcting NAS. The IBM M1015 card is among the most popular among FreeNAS users.