Hello all! I am building a workstation for photo and video editing and I don’t have the budget to build a NAS AND the workstation so I want to have a solid raid array within my workstation. I want to use raid 5 or above however my motherboard (X79) only has 2x SATA3 ports on the intel chipset, the rest are SATA2. There are 4 more SATA3 slots but they are on the marvell controller which only supports raid 0/1.
The purpose of this array is a working/staging area for video and photo data (very valuable data) for use while it is being modified and accessed regularly. After I am finished working with the files then I will move things to a separate backup but data integrity is very important to me.
From what research I have done, it is hard to find a good quality “enterprise” sata controller because most people with these kinds of demands are using SAS etc… SAS is quite a bit more expensive and so I’d prefer to stick with SATA if I can for these drives.
Does anyone have some suggestions? I’m open to all options…
(Please note I’m going X79 to save money, I got a brand new board on eBay for $200 and an i7-3930k for $150! A different mobo is out of the question. The mobo is the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 rev 1.0 fyi)
Are you sure an older SAS card won't suit your needs? Something like a Dell PERC 6/i (or e) or a HP SmartArray p410 should suit your needs.
Although they are older cards, they are perfectly fine for spinning rust RAID. I do believe the Dell card can not handle larger than 2TB drives, however the HP (with latest firmware) can support larger than 2TB. (I would NOT use either of these cards for SSD raids due to A: Throughput B: The lack of drive conditioning for flash based storage)
If you're just looking for pure speed. (And seeing as you're doing backups) Why not get an SSD?
I was mainly trying to avoid the cost of SAS drives, can you run a data drive on a SAS connection like that with an adapter?
Speed is not my main concern, really its that I want to use the drives and storage of very valuable photos/video on a cycling basis and so I can't afford to lose that data. I little speed bump from raid 5 is nice, my intent was to run 2-4TB HGST 7200rpm SATA III NAS drives, 3-4 of them.
EDIT: I should mention that this will NOT be my boot drive. I will be booting off an Samsung 950 Pro m.2 on a pci-e 3.0 x4 adapter. I need 4-6 TB of total usable storage on this array.
EDIT: I read up on the HP unit, I didn't realize you could adapt SATA to a SAS connection, So I could use something like this http://www.amazon.com/dp/B018YHSDRW?gclid=CPCb-8mW6swCFceCfgodSEIESg Would it be best to split 4 drives across the two Mini-SAS connectors with two adapters or throw all 4 drives on one adapter to one mini-sas ?
Either Windows or UEFI mac-hack, I hate windows but love the adobe suite so I find myself using mac os (I do love working on mac os, even if it does cost more from the factory lol). I've ran the UEFI mac os "hackintosh" on several machines before ('i.e. no boot loader")
Ive messed with a few of the linux options but Im just so used to the adobe lightroom/photoshop/premier workflow =/ one day!!! <3 linux
SAS controllers can be used with both SAS and SATA drives. Whilst SATA controllers can only use SATA drives.
The reason being is due to the signalling, SAS drives actually have an extra 7 pins for secondary signalling. (Which means you can plug a drive into two controllers) These pins sit on an actual bridged part of the drive, preventing SAS from being plugged into SATA.
SAS cables actually carry 4 channels of data across them (so plugging into one of the two connectors or spitting them would make zero difference in performance). Bear in mind for the HP card (I mentioned) you'd be looking at SFF-8087 connector NOT the SFF-8643. Like this
There are also differences in the cables, you may see a mention of "forward" and "reverse" cables. These are wired slightly different and in your use case you will require "forward" cables.
(On an off post ramble, the reason for reverse breakouts (or break-ins???) is that some server Mobo's have SAS controllers with SATA ports on them (Eg Supermicro X8STi) and you may need to connect to a backplane with a single connector. Hence you use a break-in and solve that issue.)
On a note about OS's. The advantage of hardware RAID, is the RAID pool will appear as a single drive to the Host OS and is usually easier to recover from failure than a software or OS based RAID.
1) Workstation for work-related projects - you need stability, 2) Picture files you work with are valuable - you need resilience and preferably protection from Bitrot, 3) You use the Adobe suite.
Looking at that list I think OSX should be ruled out. A hackintosh should not IMO be used for a workstation that need stability. Sure its a fun project but do you want to be fixing it instead of working after the latest update causes problems?
That means you need Windows to run the Adobe suite. Is that the only thing you need Windows for, or is this machine going be running other software or even games that you need Windows for?
If despite hating Windows, you are going to be spending most of your time there for other things as well as Adobe, you probably need to bite the bullet and go Windows 10 Pro. Using this you can now create a resilient storage pool using ReFS that will protect your work from bit-rot or drive failure. You can use Virtual box or Hyper-V for any Linux workloads you run. Putty and Xming work well for accessing Linux VM's running under Hyper-V.
If Adobe is the only thing you will run on Windows then I'd probably opt for Fedora 24 as my base OS. It's installation software allows you to easily create mirrored disks etc.. I would then use VMworkstation for my Windows VM - as it's GPU emulation is pretty good and I believe Adobe can use it fully for acceleration, you can also test it for free or pay for the full product to get all the features and support. To protect against Bitrot I would explore setting up a BTRFS or ZFS set of disks. These could be shared so that the Windows VM could access them directly, or it could still have its own ReFS storage pool using multiple VMDK files that are held on Mirrored disks under Ext4.
There are of course plenty of other options open to you but I think the need to run Adobe, and the need for this to be a solid machine that is reliable narrow them. You could for example explore using PC-BSD which makes setting up ZFS tanks which use a mixture of SSD's and HDD's a doddle but has more limited virtualiation options to get Windows running well. Pass through GPU's to windows VM's like hackintoshes are a PITA. They work well for some, less well for others, and can sometimes be easily broken by updates.
Thank you! I really appreciate the information, I certainly agree with a hardware raid controller. The HP SmartArray p410 sounds perfect, I found on on eBay w/o write cache module & BBU for $15 and then I picked up a 1GB write cache module with BBU for $40 to go with it.
Also I noted your comment on the cable situation as well, mini-sas not HD mini sas
Yeah OS X is probably not a good option, I know how to lock down windows 10 pretty well so I'll probably just do that. I may play a few games but that will be pretty rare.
Thanks for all the information, for simplicity and the write cache with BBU I'm going to go with the hardware raid controller. I may one day switch platforms, I do want to see linux take over the desktop world but I'm just not there yet ;)
I will say though, I have had A LOT of success with booting OS X through native UEFI. There is a great app that lets you modify the original OS X installer so that it will boot, but once you're booted you can install pretty much OEM OS X on your desired boot device with no funny business. So long as you hand pick your hardware to match OEM apple kernel extensions then everything pretty much runs out of the box with no issues. (there are loads of broadcom network adapters that work out of the box, I've even heard that some intel options work well) But any device that runs off the native chipset through UEFI will work fine this way. If you want facetime/imessage you can replace a few identifiers in the config.plist on the EFI volume with OEM apple identifiers and it works just fine. You're compatibility with peripherals is limited to "apple" compatible cards and accessories but Its pretty solid.
The old hacked boot loaders are terrible and have loads of issues but that method I described above works really well.
