[SOLVED] Supporting many disks on one motherboard?

[zerophase]

I'm going to RAID 0 a bunch of nvme drives. I'm just trying to figure out the max amount of drives I could install in RAID 0 on the system. I had heard the Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI can only support 10 disks in RAID 0. Is that per RAID 0 array, or for the entire system? In other words could I dedicate the vast majority of those PCIe lanes to nvme drives?

 

[USAFRet]

I'm going to RAID 0 a bunch of nvme drives.

Why?

 

[zerophase]

Why?

For really fast fast read and write speeds. Trying to saturate the PCIe gen 4 lanes for a ZFS NAS.

 

[USAFRet]

For really fast fast read and write speeds. Trying to saturate the PCIe gen 4 lanes for a ZFS NAS.

'really fast'

For what workload?
Over what interface/connection type?

Seeing as this motherboard has 3x M.2 ports....you'll be connecting all these drive how, exactly?

Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI - Tech Specs｜Motherboards｜ASUS USA

ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI is engineered to unleash the incredible power of the latest AMD® Ryzen® Threadripper™ Pro series processors and is a reliable foundation for professional creative workloads that benefit from multi-core CPUs, such as video editing and 3D rendering. Additionally...

www.asus.com

 

[zerophase]

'really fast'

For what workload?
Over what interface/connection type?

Seeing as this motherboard has 3x M.2 ports....you'll be connecting all these drive how, exactly?

Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI - Tech Specs｜Motherboards｜ASUS USA

ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI is engineered to unleash the incredible power of the latest AMD® Ryzen® Threadripper™ Pro series processors and is a reliable foundation for professional creative workloads that benefit from multi-core CPUs, such as video editing and 3D rendering. Additionally...

www.asus.com

Through a raid card. It's the PCIe lanes for expansion cards. I'm trying to check the max amount of disks it can support through that. I had heard there's a limit where you can't add more drives to the array.

It's for crypto. I'm trying to get as fast as possible disk write and read speeds for mining coins. Ideally, there'd be a custom board for this use case, but those are not out yet.

 

[zerophase]

I'm trying to build a system that can host many disks. Being able to get the disks online for cheap is more important than performance. Though, I still want stability. Would a Rog Crosshair VIII Hero with an AMD Athlon 3000g be enough for hosting at least 40 disks with 2 of these . I don't think I could fit a third card on that board. I also heard you can get a SAS card, and support 32 disks per card with a SAS to SATA breakout card. What would I be looking for in one of those cards? Are they reliable? Would I be able to get 72 disks on that board then?

 

[USAFRet]

I'm trying to build a system that can host many disks.

What will this be used for?

 

[DSzymborski]

Threads are merged. This is one issue and this is not a buffet; one plate per customer.

 

[zerophase]

What will this be used for?

For storing Chia. I need stability over disk performance. I'd just like to be able to store as many disks per system without having the machine be a hassle to keep up. Ideally somewhere between 60 to 100 eighteen TB drives per board. I think having ecc ram would be a good idea. So, how cheap should I go for a decent server board, which allows me to add more SAS to SATA ports?

 

[lvt]

For storing Chia.

How about this one?

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/322365-new-chia-mining-motherboard-includes-32-sata-ports

 

[zerophase]

How about this one?

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/322365-new-chia-mining-motherboard-includes-32-sata-ports

That's interesting but I don't think it's out yet. I'm worried about component failure killing an array, and don't know if that has protections against it. It's certainly of interest depending on how well it reviews.

 

[GoofyOne]

Howdy. Hmmm a bunch of NVMe drives sounds expensive. I did see a video about a PCIe 4.0 card that takes multiple NVMe drives and is insanely fast. I think it was on Linus Tech Tips site (sorry moderators .. don't shoot the messenger).

Aha I found it: PCIe 4.0 x 16 Card with multiple NVMe

There are also cards that take 4 x NVMe SSDs, that go into PCIe 3.0 x 16 slots. They require certain features on the motherboard/BIOS though, it needs the motherboard to be able to 'split' the PCIe lanes. Their words not mine.



{GoofyOne's 2c worth .... which may or may not be actually worth 2c ... if it's worth more, just put yer money on the fridge}