Computer nerd question!

[GH85Carrera]

I bought two of these 6TB drives at a great price from Amazon. I did not notice they were SAS 12 Gb/s drives. From what I can figure out, they are the new version of SCSI drives.



OK, I will need an adapter card to get them to work in the system. No sweat, lots of room in the full tower case.

I have two 6TB drives, and with the giant files we generate, hard drive space is needed more than another RAID, but I see the advantage of a mirrored RAID of 6TB size.

I see lots of PCI-Express 3.0 cards, and the prices range from dirt cheap, to breathtaking expensive. The 12 Gb/s seems to be the big price jump. The 6 Gb/s cars are the cheap ones. The fast cards a expensive. All I really need is a two or 4 drive capable PCI card that can handle the speed and be reliable.

Is there a big difference in real world performance in the 6 or 12 Gb/s. The simple math is twice as fast. Is that realistic?

Anyone with a suggestion for a PCI card that is good, or one to avoid? If the expensive ($250+) are necessary OK. I was hoping to get an under $200 card and cables to make it work. A 4 port card may be better if I can add two more 6TB drives.

[widebody911]

I don't understand this sentence:

hard drive space is needed more than another RAID, but I see the advantage of a mirrored RAID of 6TB size

Are you saying your preference is for a simple JBOD setup as opposed to RAID? I think at this point you're better off with RAID.

Can the rest of the hardware keep up with 12gb/s or would you be putting R-compound tires on a Yugo?

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by widebody911

I don't understand this sentence:

hard drive space is needed more than another RAID, but I see the advantage of a mirrored RAID of 6TB size

Are you saying your preference is for a simple JBOD setup as opposed to RAID? I think at this point you're better off with RAID.

Can the rest of the hardware keep up with 12gb/s or would you be putting R-compound tires on a Yugo?

Yea, it is a next gen i7 8 cores 8 threads CPU and 64 Gig of RAM, with a mirrored SSD boot hard drive. It is a fast machine, it just needs more storage space. I would rather put 12 TB in in that 6 TB of RAID.

[Seahawk]

I know the discussion is important and I wish I knew more about computers, but this is what I understand:

[MysticLlama]

One not quite RAID option is to use storage spaces, which came out with Windows 10.

Instead of losing an immediate half of the drive, you can set certain folders to keep x# of copies on separate drives. So you could have a couple of folders that always have a mirrored copy basically, but you could have other folders that contain stuff that isn't as important that wouldn't take up double the space.

[flipper35]

Or you could buy a third drive and do raid 5 which is fault tolerant, at the expense of a bit of speed in R/W. The other thing to consider is how fast your application can process the data as it loads or saves. If it is just a scratch drive or a drive for temporary storage space for projects then striped raid 0 will be the highest speed, assuming the application can process that fast.

These will be fast and are made to work in a NAS or SAN as part of a large block of storage in the enterprise class cabinets.

[Clint Lando]

[spuggy]

RAID5 has been dead and gone for practical purposes for almost 10 years; pretty much happened when drive sizes went over 1-2TB. The likelihood of another drive from the same batch dying as you stress the survivors trying to resilver the replacement is, well, likely to the point of being almost inevitable.

And that is catastrophic; there is no way to come back from losing 2 drives in RAID5. This seems like a good time to mention that using RAID is no substitute for backups for things you cannot afford to lose...

Not to mention array rebuild time - especially if you're trying to keep the host online/active - increases exponentially, to the point that you're severely impacting/degrading performance for significant periods. Remember, it has to read all the data that's left, calc parity, and then write it to the new drive. Can take dozens of hours for larger arrays.

RAID6 (two parity drives) is a better bet. Although RAID10 (striped, mirrored) will out-perform it, it isn't quite as resilient - you can lose up to 50% of the drives in RAID10 and not lose data - but only if you lose the right 50%... Whereas with RAID6, you can lose any 2 drives out of every group (the size of which, typically, you don't want going over a certain number anyway - let's say 8 is best for throughput, just for the sake of argument).

RAID 50, or 60 - (mirrored RAID5/RAID6) is also an option.

I'd suggest you buy an LSI (now called Broadcom, Avango) card - I have many of these, and they work flawlessly. Unlike some cards, LSI HBAs let you use drives in JBOD mode transparently/without lots of hoops - and SMART pass-through for diagnostics/monitoring/tests Just Works.

I almost never use hardware RAID on these cards - because ZFS is more featureful (only filesystem that writes checksums for files, and allows you to scrub/fix them before you lose data). But the hardware RAID kinda works. Until you lose a drive and test the SMART attributes to realize that almost all the drives are tottering/about to die... Those Barracudas were the last Seagates I ever bought... Shrug.

LSI cards come in all sorts of models - from HBAs (just interfaces to the drive), to RAID firmware on the same card, right up to hardware RAID cards with a dedicated CPU and cache RAM on-board that's almost like a year 2000 PC... Don't use cache RAM without battery backup, BTW... The same hardware is also branded by folks like Dell, IBM, HP, Lenovo etc.

The hardware RAID controllers all look pretty silly now IMO - in light of modern CPU speeds and RAM sizes.

For your usage, I'd say an LSI 2008 (9201-8i) card would be fine; cheap as chips. Flash any firmware you want on them. A 93xx or 94xx card would give you a faster chipset and 12GB/s SAS/SATA interface speed - but frankly, it's spinning rust @ 7200 RPM - interface speed is unlikely to be your limiting factor here, LOL...

Beware no-name Chinese SATA/SAS breakout cables, because there's nothing worse than finding you've got issues with CRC and other errors that look like flakey hardware after multiple weeks of uptime. Find a SuperMicro cable that does the job, it's about twice the price of the no-name (hint: almost always cheaper directly from the SuperMicro eShop than on Amazon or Flea Bay) - but they test it and it will work. I had to swap out multiple HBAs, caddies, enclosures - and swap multiple drives around - before I believed it was the cables. But the problem has never come back and its been several years now...


Oh, and if you didn't already know, avoid providing 3.3V to pin 3 on that drive, either by masking the connector on the drive off, masking it off on the interposer, or by using cables that don't power it (eg SAS breakout cables powered by a Molex power connector - which can only provide 5V/12V, and thus don't power pin 3). Otherwise it'll be stuck in a permanent reset and the drive will never power up (caught me out when I picked up some 8Ts recently and naively plugged them in with an HP SAS/SATA interposer - and then sat around scratching my head going "WTF?" for a while).

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by flipper35

These will be fast

Nah, even though "fast" is relative, these are not fast. They're for NL storage. If they were fast, they'd be dual-ported, spin at twice the speed and be many, many, times (like 20 or 30x) the price.

[spuggy]

Another wrinkle is that these are almost certainly 4Ke blocks. So your mobo ports may not be able to understand/do anything with them.

You're probably better off buying a NAS enclosure - like the Drobo, Synology, QNap et al - and just letting it take care of the details.

The modern ones will almost certainly let you plug these drives straight in (but check, because I didn't). And you can use certain enclosure models as a DAS too, for faster access speeds (still slower than an HBA and internally-fitted drives, but quicker than 1GB network).

At least some of those enclosures offer features like transparently growing the array when you add more drives. Or swapping larger capacity drives in later to grow the array. Did I mention that there's no substitute for good backups?

They all offer different features (personal cloud, direct media playback through HDMI, plex etc etc). Pick the features that seem useful to you...

[GH85Carrera]

The thread is interesting. Thanks guys.

It sorta drifted off topic. We have a couple of Networked RAIDS. What I really was hoping to do was just find a card that will read the and write to the drives that I can add to that computer.

I guess if buying an enclosure is the best option I will look into that.

But, any recommendations on a PCI card that will plug in to a Windows 10 Pro computer, and let me start using the drives?

[flipper35]

Originally Posted by spuggy

Nah, even though "fast" is relative, these are not fast. They're for NL storage. If they were fast, they'd be dual-ported, spin at twice the speed and be many, many, times (like 20 or 30x) the price.

For a home business user.

[widebody911]

Originally Posted by spuggy

NIf they were fast, they'd be flash

Fixed it for you

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

But, any recommendations on a PCI card that will plug in to a Windows 10 Pro computer, and let me start using the drives?

Any LSI card after the 1xxx generation chipset would be my choice (current range is 3xxx or 4xxx, older 2xxx should still "work"). Re-branded to Broadcom, re-branded again to Avango (what they're currently sold as).

You'll still need to take care of mask off pin 3 (probably easier to just do pins 1-3), unless it won't see 3.3V there for some other reason.

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by flipper35

For a home business user.

Enterprise == optimized for endurance. As opposed to drives intended for "sometimes" or "light" usage, like many consumer drives intended for DVR or survielllance system usage. Which tend not only to power-down when not it use, but will have a tendancy to throw their toys out of the pram and suddenly die if you start kicking them with any serious throughput. Yeh, there are brands I simply won't buy with my own money.

These drives will run 24/7/365 - that's what they're built for. Worth noting that many "consumer" drives will actually also do this just fine but without the price premium. HGST's old DeskStar and TravelStar drives were pretty much just fine being used as though they had a label on them that said UltraStar...

That said, some "consumer" drives will call "Uncle" pretty quick. And exhibit all sorts of annoying tendencies; like calling for a timeout, going to sleep or just sulking and refusing to play anymore, ever...

Within enterprise, there are classes for speed. These drives are for NL storage, and are optimized for capacity. As they spin at 7200 RPM, they will not be any faster, in any real usage, than any other 7200 RPM drive. If they were dual-ported, then it may be possible, with the correct hardware, to drive them somewhat harder (have them doing more things). But you cannot utilize that with a single host/HBA - plus these are optimized for capacity, not speed. So there isn't much point providing that facility, and they likely don't have it.

Being all-rust, they will almost certainly, In Real Life, be considerably slower than a hybrid SSD/HDD laptop drive (described as "not for use in RAID", but which nevertheless hold up pretty well in that usage for me for a couple of years before I switched to Samsung EVO SSDs).

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by spuggy

Any LSI card after the 1xxx generation chipset would be my choice (current range is 3xxx or 4xxx, older 2xxx should still "work"). Re-branded to Broadcom, re-branded again to Avango (what they're currently sold as).

You'll still need to take care of mask off pin 3 (probably easier to just do pins 1-3), unless it won't see 3.3V there for some other reason.

Ok, thanks. Pin 3 on the interface cable or the power cable?

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by widebody911

Fixed it for you

Heh. First time I booted a laptop from an mSATA card, I was sold - "what? already? sheesh".... So much faster than hybrid wasn't even funny... Still the single best way to rejuvenate your mom's laptop; put an SSD in it. Assuming you already maxed out the RAM, of course..

But even those are still constrained by the SATA interface. Last laptop I bought had 4 NVME slots - no mSATA, no CD or SATA bays...

And if you're using an enclosure or system capable of it, difficult to imagine a better use for SSD than L2 on the front-end. For large cap, hard to ignore manuf-refurb 8TB Enterprise drives with 1500 hours/zero defects for $120 a pop...

I've run Samsung EVOs exclusively for the last few years and been very happy with them overall (unlike some of the cheaper offerings). Be interesting to see how 4T 1351 Nytros pan out...

[GH85Carrera]

The computer it is going into has two 1TB SSD drives and 64 Gig of RAM and a fast next gen CPU in the full size tower. It has room for many drives, It ain't no laptop, even for Andre the Giant.

My goal was to add hard drives as we needed them for temporary storage of files. A single client folder can be over 1 TB of just data. We most the important parts to our RAID after the project is done, and paid for and no more changes likely.

The goal now is to find a PCI card that will plug into the motherboard, and allow me to add the SAS drives as a simple data drive, only fast.

[widebody911]

Originally Posted by spuggy

I've run Samsung EVOs exclusively for the last few years and been very happy with them overall

Same here. I have an aging HP ZR600 with mirrored 2TB drives that I'm tempted to upgrade.

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Ok, thanks. Pin 3 on the interface cable or the power cable?

Power.

P3 is pin 3 on the power side - or the 15-pin connector on a SATA power connector.

Otherwise it'd be an S pin - for signal; the side provided by the 7-pin SATA connector.

e.g.: https://pinoutguide.com/HD/SAS_connector_pinout.shtml