WHS/RAID/Controller questions

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drgnfang

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 13, 2007
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Bear with me for a while, I'm in the midst of planning my Storage project and have a ton of questions. Most will be asked in a single thread, but this one was bugging me so I figured I would go ahead and ask...

It looks like I will be using the Norco 4020 (the deal can't be beat, thanks Ockie).

Assuming I'm using WHS with drive extender... Haven't tried it yet, but it looks very nice.

Is there any point to having a RAID5/6 in the "background"? Is that even possible?

If I'm not using RAID are there options besides the 1280ML for getting all 20 drives up and running that is reliable and easy to manage?

Thanks.

 
WHS is basically a server 2003 operating system, the WHS function is basically an application, kinda like how media center is.

You can run drives and arrays outside of the windows home server pool, in fact, you can run the entire OS without even using WHS. So you can run arrays alongside WHS pools.

WHS has it's own raid type concept in which you can turn on duplication for certian shares, this would scatter duplicate copies of files accross your drive pools. So if you are worried about data, you can have WHS configured to have a directory just for secured documents and a directory for everything else (non protected).

IIRC, you can even add an array into a pool if you desired.


The supermicro SAT2 controller works wonders and is very affordable to connect sata disks to your WHS system.
 
Yeah, reading up on it seems like a mix of software JBOD and a custom file duplicator. Honestly it's the JBOB aspect which interests me. Being able to put all of my random drives in the machine will speed up getting it up and running (vs. having to buy a chunk of 750g or 1t drives).

Looking at the SAT2 card now. I like it. Know of anything similar with 10 or 12 ports?

 
drgnfang said:
Yeah, reading up on it seems like a mix of software JBOD and a custom file duplicator. Honestly it's the JBOB aspect which interests me. Being able to put all of my random drives in the machine will speed up getting it up and running (vs. having to buy a chunk of 750g or 1t drives).

Looking at the SAT2 card now. I like it. Know of anything similar with 10 or 12 ports?

Click to expand...

Nothing really similar for the price range. These do also run in normal PCI slots and they work great. And since you have WHS running, you would have no problems running more than one controller.
 
I have a 4-port PCI sata controller which had serious issues with bus staturation... Wouldn't this also be an issue with running one of these in a std pci slot?

Thanks!

 
drgnfang said:
I have a 4-port PCI sata controller which had serious issues with bus staturation... Wouldn't this also be an issue with running one of these in a std pci slot?

Thanks!

Click to expand...


Depends on how you are planning on accessing your data. A PCI bus is 133MBs, thats beyond gigabit performance. So if you are planning on accessing your data remotley or via network and only have a gigabit nic, you aren't going to hit any ceilings.
 
Thanks for your help with this Ockie.
One last question (for now), do these SAT cards support hot-swapping? Does WHS support ACHI for the on-board sata ports?

 
drgnfang said:
Yeah, reading up on it seems like a mix of software JBOD and a custom file duplicator. Honestly it's the JBOB aspect which interests me. Being able to put all of my random drives in the machine will speed up getting it up and running (vs. having to buy a chunk of 750g or 1t drives).

Looking at the SAT2 card now. I like it. Know of anything similar with 10 or 12 ports?

Click to expand...

Well if you have a pci-x you could use an Adaptec 21610SA 16 ports for JBOD raid support is available but is not fast.

drgnfang said:
Thanks for your help with this Ockie.
One last question (for now), do these SAT cards support hot-swapping? Does WHS support ACHI for the on-board sata ports?

Click to expand...

Yes it does... like Ockie stated WHS is merely and application that is highly integrated with server 2003

What motherboard are you using?
 
Ockie said:
Depends on how you are planning on accessing your data. A PCI bus is 133MBs, thats beyond gigabit performance. So if you are planning on accessing your data remotley or via network and only have a gigabit nic, you aren't going to hit any ceilings.
Click to expand...

This is what a lot of people miss when building servers for the home. Many people aren't using multiple Ethernet ports or fiber. They just have that single little port in the back of their machine. Therefor you really are limited to about 1.064 Gigabit. Factor in overhead and you have saturation just with a single PCI card.
 
Well, I'll have at most 3 machines hitting it at once so until I go HD I don't see the point of multi-NICs. Streaming uncompressed DVD's to 2 machines doesn't even hit 5% of the gig-e on my XP box currently acting as file server. At least till I do 2x Fast Forward, that will spike it to around 10-12%.

The bus saturation on the controller is more of an issue when doing local copies. Moving about 300g between 2 HDD both on the same PCI sata2 controller (a promise 4 port) took about 9 hours I think. I actually bought a new mobo for this machine so I wouldn't have to suffer through that again.

 
Too bad there isn't a windows iSCSI target/host for WHS.. it's the only reason I am playing around with OpenFiler, to be a iSCSI target for my Hyper-V machines.
 
Lazn_Work said:
Too bad there isn't a windows iSCSI target/host for WHS.. it's the only reason I am playing around with OpenFiler, to be a iSCSI target for my Hyper-V machines.
Click to expand...

Ive been working on a WHS iSCSI target solution...but whats available is so limited when it comes to options unless I want to pay a lot of money.
 
i know its old, but any one use mysan as a iSCSI server for WHS and get it to add the iSCSI to the drive pool.

I would love to run unraid when it gets iSCSI support or something like that. I hate the wasted space of Drive Duplicator (raid 1ish) and yes i want everything duplicated....
 
Adidas4275 said:
i know its old, but any one use mysan as a iSCSI server for WHS and get it to add the iSCSI to the drive pool.

I would love to run unraid when it gets iSCSI support or something like that. I hate the wasted space of Drive Duplicator (raid 1ish) and yes i want everything duplicated....
Click to expand...

The only problem I have found with that would be that the Pool is loaded before software iSCSI would.
 
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