PC Raid and NAS advice

[GarrettStudio]

Looking for some hardware advice.

I recently purchased a QNAP NAS unit which was meant to replace my now aging WHS 2011. I had 3 fairly new WD Red 3TB drives in it which I have now moved into the NAS unit.

When I bought the NAS, it was thinking I was just going to set it up as a JBOD and bought a 6TB WD Gold. But then I changed my mind and now looking for best solutions mostly because I want the NAS to have more storage than I will get when I add that 4th drive to it.

I know now that I don't really need the gold drives in my NAS for my purposes but I don't want to go through the process of returning the gold drive and figure it will last longer...so my thoughts are these.

I will buy 2 more gold 6TB and run 3 drives in my NAS for now (which will still get me 12TB which is more than my 9TB once I added my 4th drive) and add the 4th drive later which would put me at 18TB (running RAID 5---I know I know...not anyone's favorite but works for what I need it for). If I do this then I was thinking I would take those 3 Red drives and create a RAID 0 on my desktop which I have wanted to boost the performance of my storage drive (currently running 2 SSDs for my OS drive and just a single HDD for storage but have started doing some 4k video editing so wanted better performance out of my storage drive...plus in this scenario I would just have the drives laying around anyways.)

This brings me to my first question. My mobo has 6 SATA III ports and 4 are used now. Plus I am not sure that even if I moved the optical drive and the storage drive off to make room for the 3 red drives that my mobo will support 2 separate RAID groups. (not sure on that though). So I am looking for an option for a PCI card for those 3 drives and then just do a W7 software RAID. I know the performance is not the best but my 8 core processor is never fully maxed with my uses and software RAID is still better performance than just stand alone drives. (and I don't really want to use a cheap raid controller with all the issues they seem to have.)

So can anyone recommend a card to use for this purpose...which will handle 3 drives and the data rates of 3 drives in a RAID 0? Every inexpensive card I find has terrible reviews or is a PCIe x1 so would limit the performance it could get from the 3 drive raid.

Another option is the just keep upgrading the Red drives over time in the NAS and buy another gold 6tb and set up a striping raid in my desktop. Still would need a card for this.

Any other options I am not thinking of?

Thanks in advance!

 

[marko55]

https://www.amazon.com/IO-Crest-SI-PEX40062-Controller-Green/dp/B00AZ9T41M/ref=sr_1_17?ie=UTF8&qid=1500830040&sr=8-17&keywords=pcie+sata+expansion+card

These work well and use 2x PCIe lanes for a little more bandwidth so if you were to ever connect any SSDs you'll be OK. The versions of these that only use PCIe 1x connectors are gonna be limited to about 500MB/s to the motherboard, so if you had even 4 x HDDs connected you would theoretically be limiting potential full bandwidth to those HDDs (consider possible 200MB/s for good 7200RPM HDDs) but that also depends on the HDDs connected.

If you're just using striping in Windows, via disk manager, you can create multiple "RAIDs."

What motherboard & chipset are you using?

 

[GarrettStudio]

https://www.amazon.com/IO-Crest-SI-...040&sr=8-17&keywords=pcie+sata+expansion+card

These work well and use 2x PCIe lanes for a little more bandwidth so if you were to ever connect any SSDs you'll be OK. The versions of these that only use PCIe 1x connectors are gonna be limited to about 500MB/s to the motherboard, so if you had even 4 x HDDs connected you would theoretically be limiting potential full bandwidth to those HDDs (consider possible 200MB/s for good 7200RPM HDDs) but that also depends on the HDDs connected.

If you're just using striping in Windows, via disk manager, you can create multiple "RAIDs."

What motherboard & chipset are you using?

Need help and thought you might be able to help.

I bought this card listed and set up the raid which worked great.

I have since had a mobo fail and had to replace. Figured the raid would be safe since it is on a card rather than mobo or software.

Raid was set up in W7 but after replacing mobo installed W10 and the raid will not show up in the disk management.

During boot, there is a post screen which shows the 3 drives hooked to the card and in device manager those 3 drives show up under Disk Drives.

I have installed the drivers from Syba website as instructed but still cannot see that raid. Kind of freaking out here since there was a couple months worth of data not backed up from the raid.

Any thoughts would be great!