I just bought a X-Case RM 424 rack chasis and ordered 4 HGST 3TB NAS drives. In the future i will expand and probably fill all 24 bays.
So i need the hardware that's capable of driving that. The chassis doesn't have a backplane expander so i have 6 SAS connectors to populate and will need HBA cards. But for now i want a Motherboard that can connect as many drivers as possible. Quick question is there any drawback by using SAS to SATA over SAS to SAS?
For the CPU i have no idea which one should i get.
Okay. Couple things here. First: 4 is a wierd number for your array. Are you planning raidz-1, raidz-2, etc? If so, 5 or 6 drives would be a better choice. At 2TB+, you should really have double parity if you're going to have any, so keep that in mind.
Second: do you really have the storage requirements to warrant 24x3TB drives? If so, awesome, I'm supremely jealous, for some reason I love storage.
For the CPU i have no idea which one should i get.
Depends on your use case. Is this just going to serve SMB and NFS or are you going to be doing CPU intensive operations?
Quick question is there any drawback by using SAS to SATA over SAS to SAS?
None that I know of for home use. Basically, SAS provides the ability for better prefailure diagnostics and tuning. It's going to cost you significantly more to use SAS though.
Grab this LSI 9201-16i and this one as well LSI 9201-8i
Another thing to note is that a dedicated ZIL and L2ARC disk would be good. grab a couple samsung 850 pro 120GB or 240GB drives. assign one as ZIL one as cache and reap the iops benefits.
Once you populate your drives, you'll be cooking with gas!
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Oo ok i was thinking 3 disks for raidz-1 and one spare. Yesterday i started searching a little bit and one article was about how raidz-1,2 are inefficient and that a better alternative is by doing mirroring. What's up with that?
Ofc 24x3TB is ridiculous. The 4u case was almost the same as the 3u one so i bought the bigger.
Just SMB over the network sharing. I wanted to do an all in one linux os, zfs and windows in linux with virtualisation but i need thunderbolt 3. So to buy a server motherboard would force me to buy a new platform and i can't imagine how much a new xeon would cost that could support this. So i am gonna split up.
In my main rig i have two 850 EVO and 840 EVO 240 GB i thought i could use them for caching.
With cooking with gas you mean? Electricity bill will be high...
Oo ok i was thinking 3 disks for raidz-1 and one spare. Yesterday i started searching a little bit and one article was about how raidz-1,2 are inefficient and that a better alternative is by doing mirroring. What's up with that?
That works as well, I don't usually use a hot spare, but depending on your use case it works.
About the inefficiency of parity raid, essentially, it is limited to the IO of a single drive because of the parity calculation. I can't explain it very well, but mirroring allows you to mirror across 2 drives, then stripe the mirrors together to allow for (n/2)*single_disk_speed performance instead of single_disk_speed performance.
Ofc 24x3TB is ridiculous. The 4u case was almost the same as the 3u one so i bought the bigger.
Fair enough, nothing wrong with that, just curious.
Just SMB over the network sharing. I wanted to do an all in one linux os, zfs and windows in linux with virtualisation but i need thunderbolt 3. So to buy a server motherboard would force me to buy a new platform and i can't imagine how much a new xeon would cost that could support this. So i am gonna split up.
You don't need to buy a newest-gen xeon. the e5-2670 (first gen) chips are very capable and may be overkill for your needs. They go for ~$80 USD on ebay last I checked. Combine that with an x79 motherboard (check compatibility lists, it can be tricky) and you're golden.
In my main rig i have two 850 EVO and 840 EVO 240 GB i thought i could use them for caching.
The reason I recommended the pro drives is the performance difference. It's almost not worth ripping them out of your main system to serve as caching. pro drives are inexpensive and will work just fine. Thinking about your total storage capacities, you may be best off using 120GB drives.
With cooking with gas you mean? Electricity bill will be high...
It's a figure of speech, usually refers to using your equipment efficiently. (gas stove tops were advertised (early 1900s) as higher efficiency than wood fired stoves)