Recomendations for controller card

[ncc74656]

what are your thoughts on the best controller card for the least amount of money.

9 platter 2TB drives for storage in raid 5 or 10
3 intel SSD's in raid-0 with 128K strip.

would like the possibility to expand a further 3-6 drives in the future.

motherboard is MSI Big Bang fuzion so ive got plenty of PCI-E

 

[psaus]

Something like this:
http://www.infortrend.com/global/products/models/ESDS%20S16F-G2840
Or this:
http://www.infortrend.com/global/products/models/ESDS%20S24F-G2840

attaching it to the system with something like the 2500 series from here:
http://www.qlogic.com/Products/adapters/Pages/FibreChannelAdapters.aspx

But that aint cheap...

Seeing that your attaching this to an MSI desktop board (vs a server/workstation), you might be asking for something more like this:
http://www.lsi.com/products/storagecomponents/Pages/MegaRAIDSAS9260-16i.aspx
Or this:
http://www.lsi.com/products/storagecomponents/Pages/MegaRAIDSAS9280-24i4e.aspx

But these last 2 are more for using the drives internally, but how you are going to stuff 12 (and later potentially 18) drives into a PC single case is beyond me. Gonna need one heckofa PSU(s) and lots of cooling

As for the 9 platter RAID, you will have to go with RAID 5 or 6 if you're going to use an odd numbered set of drives. For 10 you have to have an even number.

If you're just looking for a whole mess of storage, and looking for easy upgrades in the future, look at getting a Drobo box or 2...
http://www.drobo.com/products/index.php

 

[ncc74656]

i curerntly have 9 platter drives and 3 SSD's in my desktop tower and i can fit 5 more if i had to. these will ALL be internal as i dislike external drives, they are to easy to drop, fall, or be thrown out a window.

 

[ncc74656]

the storage racks are not what im looking for. the second set of links with the fiber cards are tempting and i do run a cisco fiber capable switch in the house here but its in the basement and im on the top floor and i really dont need that kind of network speed. the SAS 9260-16i is what fits the best i think. i am sad to see it only has 512MB of cache tho and it does not appear to be upgradeable..

 

[foscooter]

The review on this RAID card are grand!

The SSD Review - HighPoint 2720SGL RocketRAID....

Only 8 port: 2xSAS to 4 SATA each, with SAS-to-SATA adapter cables, which you have to buy.

But, it is only $160 on newegg.com here.

 

[ncc74656]

8 ports are to few, ill look into a higher level card if they have one. id also like to have at least 1GB of cache on the card

 

[sk1939]

8 ports are to few, ill look into a higher level card if they have one. id also like to have at least 1GB of cache on the card

1GB is a ridiculous amount of cache, and unless it's user-upgradeable (most are not), your not going to find one. This 3Ware for example, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116045, is $800 and still only has 256MB of cache. The only manufacture I've seen that has 1GB of onboard cache is Areca, which most people love or hate. The cheapest card Areca has for what you want is $730: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151106. If you want to add 8 more ports for a total of 16, add another $130 to that price: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151108.

 

[photonboy]

I could help better if I understood what your GOAL is.

 

[ncc74656]

my goal is to increase data speed, have a single controller that i can run raid-10 with on storage drives and have more esata ports. i run with 12 dedicated system drives between platter and SSD and routinely have up to 10 more drives hooked through USB and such doing viri removals or clones ect. so i want expand-ability, dependability and speed.

 

[psaus]

my goal is to increase data speed, have a single controller that i can run raid-10 with on storage drives and have more esata ports. i run with 12 dedicated system drives between platter and SSD and routinely have up to 10 more drives hooked through USB and such doing viri removals or clones ect. so i want expand-ability, dependability and speed.

If I'm understanding this correctly, I'd like to point out 2 things

1. If you're ingesting via USB (or even a single eSATA), you don't need the array to be that fast. Your bottle neck is going to be the singular drive. Even if you had 10 USB drives working at once, you wouldn't need that speed you're thinking. Your board might have 10 physical USB3.0, but you only have 4 native channels. The 8 rear ports are shared and split via a hub from 2 native channels. And the 2 internal headers are 2 native channels. If you're backing up 8 drives simultaneously via those 8 rear ports, that hub is going to get very overworked, and you'll never come close to the performance of a 12drive RAID 10. In otherwords, in that worst case scenario (8 drives at once), the hub would get so over worked you'd get 1.33 - 1.66 channels' performance, not the full 2.
Therefore, you would get more available capacity and more stability if you go with a RAID 5 or 6, yet still never touch the maximum speed potential of the array.

2. If you want to expand later, you can't just "add" drives to the array without taking the whole thing down and rebuilding.
Therefore you'll need a place to put all this backup data (Tape, BluRay, DVD-Rs...) while you take it down and expand. Solutions like Drobo do work around this but would be just under the max speed of a complete ingest if my understanding in #1 above is correct.

 

[ncc74656]

the usb drives arnt mine, they are clients whose comps got infected or need backups done. usb is fine for that and i am fine using the usb for ide drives but if the drive has sata i would like to be able to hook it up via sta as that makes it easier for VMware to build a VMbox with a physical HD. this allows me to run hardware level tests such as MHDD, pc doctor, and spinrite to name a few.

as for the 12 drives, perhaps i would run raid5, perhaps 10 but the goal would be to get a controller that can hold that many drives so that it is able to run such a raid.