Best storage option for 50+ TB ?

[tphelps19]

I have twenty three (23) 3TB drives which of course are SATA III. I am trying to build a home theatre and I first tried to build a computer with two SAS PCI cards (each supporting 8 SATA ports) and then using the 9 on board SATA ports on my motherboard. I was then going to use FlexRaid (software raid) to handle the raid of all the drives. It didn't work too bad but that many drives isn't very stable, sometimes it just doesn't start up or it randomly crashes at various times. Also my motherboard BIOS only can see 9 drives and if your startup disc doesn't make the cut then it won't start up to it. Most of the time that's not an issue but I'm at the point where I want to start looking at just using a couple of shelfs for storage. Dell has some great power vaults that I've used before, the MD1000 and MD3000 are awesome and cheap but they don't take SATA III drives. Every shelf system I've looked at that supports SATA III are like anywhere from $3k to $15k per shelf. All I need is a couple of shelfs that can take like 12 to 15 drives each, that's all. Does anybody have any recommendations how I can do that easy and cheap? My plan is to just have a small computer by my TV that connects to the storage system over IP (house is wired gigabit).

Or is the best & cheapest solution to stay with what I have and just try to figure out why it's a little unstable? I have a EVGA Classified X58 motherboard with a first gen i7 processor in it but the board only supports SATA 3 Gb/s. I don't know if that part of the issue but the 9 onboard ports read the 3TB drives ok and I was ok with slower speeds because it's just a media server. I've been working on this project for about a year and FlexRaid was a little dicey a year ago with respect to writing data but hopefully they have solved that by now.

Any help is appreciated guys, thanks!!!!

 

[tphelps19]

I thought about maybe just buying something like this and having the entire raid run from it: http/www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/servers/raid/raid-controller-rs2sg244.html

That is if they weren't $1500! :-/

I wonder if maybe the best answer wouldn't be to just get a new motherboard with enough PCI slots to handle two more of the RocketRaid SAS cards and run every disc off of that instead of some off the PCI cards and some of the on-board slots? Uggghh.......so many questions!!!

 

[ssddx]

to be honest selling normal hdd drives as sata III is a joke as they can hardly take advantage of even sata II. the transfer speeds are so much lower than the sata II limit. the only drives which come close are 10k raptors. oh and ssd drives but we arent really dealing with them for such large storage solutions.

if you found a sata II solution which will work better than what you have now i say go for it. you dont need sata III.

 

[tphelps19]

if you found a sata II solution which will work better than what you have now i say go for it. you dont need sata III.

Well the only reason I went with SATA III is because of the 3TB size, I don't care at all about the speed. I'm just trying to figure out what the best way to put all of them in a raid without selling my house to do it!

 

[ssddx]

alot of jargon here but perhaps this thread will be of some use.

http/forums.freenas.org/threads/connecting-24-hard-drives-to-a-single-nas.2264/

i think you're going to need to use something like what you are using now except perhaps with some improvements. all of the commercial nas enclosures are much too expensive.

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you do know they makde 3tb sata II drives right?

my point about sata ii is that you can connect up your sata III drives to a sata II enclosure without any ill effects since you wont even use sata II to its maximum. sata is backwards compatible. you wont get the speed of sata III on a sata II enclosure but your drives arent fast enough to benefit anyways.

just a thought since you already found those dell boxes you were speaking of.

 

[tphelps19]

my point about sata ii is that you can connect up your sata III drives to a sata II enclosure without any ill effects since you wont even use sata II to its maximum. sata is backwards compatible. you wont get the speed of sata III on a sata II enclosure but your drives arent fast enough to benefit anyways.

Are you sure about that? I have a Dell MD1000 and a MD3000 at my office and they won't read 3TB drives at all. I don't think the issue is that they are SATA III but that it's a drive over the dreaded 2TB limit that so many systems have a max of. Is that the FAT32 & NTFS limit? My current system works, it's just kind of flaky and not really that stable. I don't know if that is because of Windows 7 or if because I have every drive maxed out on the motherboard and 16 others going through PCI SAS controllers. I'm debating buying two one more PCI SAS controller card (RocketRaid) and using that so every drive is going through that and see if that makes it more stable. Any thoughts?

 

[popatim]

yeah, the 2tb limit is not a sata issue, its an issue with the controller and Dell has End of life'd those and said they won't be making them 3tb compatable :-(

 

[ssddx]

i can verify that its not a sata issue. as i said before they did make 3tb sata II drives.

i dont believe it is a ntfs formatting issue as this is used for drives 2tb and larger. fat32 however has a maximum size of up to 2tb. are they formatted as ntfs (which they should be!) or fat 32? (if they were fat32 however you wouldnt be able to use them as 3tb drives anyways so doubt you have this formatting type).

could be a controller issue as popatim stated.

 

[tphelps19]

Any thoughts on software raid versus hardware raid? I was looking at FlexRaid, anyone have any experience with that? And with 23 hard drives, I'm really anxious to hear people's thoughts on if I should go hardware raid or software raid. And how many parity drives I should have. I will always have a spare drive laying around so is there any problem with using just one parity drive in a 23 drive RAID array?

 

[ssddx]

cant really speak myself. the only raid i've used is a 2 drive raid 1 using the motherboard controller.

i'm not a networker so do not deal with such large arrays.