I may need to make a series of posts over the coming months, but for now I will stick with one problem at a time.
I'm looking to build a NAS/Home Server/PLEX Box/"Thing" in about 6 months. I want to go with 6 WD Black 6TB drives since their read/write performance is phenomenal and the 128MB cache per drive will help a lot for things I want to do and in RAID configurations.
Right now I had selected this RAID controlled since I was planning on 4 of these drives, but now that I plan on 6, I wonder is A. Would this still work. And B. Are there better options?
Also, before someone asks why not RAID 5/6, I want the Read/Write benefits of RAID 10 :)
Obviously I'd like to retain as much speed as possible, but I'd like to not go over $300 for the card. Though I may have to with my wants in this situation.
Any help is definitely appreciated :)
Edit: This machine will be on an UPS, so I don't think any battery/ram built in will be needed, but I am willing to look into them as options. :)
Depends on what operating system you are intending to use. If you'd go with freeBSD/FreeNAS the Adaptec would still work, but LSI controllers are recommended. But with those systems low level RAID is strongly discouraged due to ZFS. Better way for such a system would be a simple HBA like the LSI 9207-8i.
If you go for a Windows or Linux system, you're good to go with either the Adaptec or any LSI. Keep in mind, that the WD Black drives are not meant to be used in RAID, because they have a much longer error recovery try time. They will confuse the controller in case of a read error and get dropped (needlessl) from the array. Don't forget your backups.
Sidenote: RAID5 would still yield benefits on read speed, but not so much on write, that is true.
Sorry, I should have mentioned what OS I was planning on using.
As bad of an idea it may be, I plan on using W10 for compatibility with my programs. Here's the part list http://pcpartpicker.com/p/7GnWNG
I plan on it having dual direct 10g connections in teaming to my main computer for 2.5GB/s (Which is for another post discussion) With it's internet connection on the motherboard's ethernet and will be VPNed.
And yes, I want the write AND read is what I want, so RAID 10 is ideal even though I loose most of the space. :)
This may not work. I've heard that the new version of smb used by windows 10 can make use of teaming for a connection between two machines, but I don't know how well that works or for what types of traffic it may benefit. Traditionally the speed of a teamed connection between any two machines can only be as fast as a single link. But I haven't tried with newer versions of windows so who knows.
Because network traffic has to arrive in order, so it can't be sent in parallel. I've heard that SMB 4 is multichannel and can do it, but I don't know enough about it to say for sure if it will work or not.
The technical reason for why it doesn't work is that when using a teamed connection it creates a hash of the source and destination address, then uses this to decide which link to use to pass the data. This means that for any two hosts they will always use only a single link. It's not made to double the bandwidth, but to bundle the link so you can have multiple links connecting to multiple machines. So the total bandwidth is increased if there are multiple machines using it but for any individual connection you are always limited to a single link speed.
But again, this may be different with SMB 4 so you may have to read up on it or ask someone who has experience with it.
But you won't saturate a single 10gb connection with that RAID array anyway so it doesn't really matter.
Well, for one in regards to the LAG, when doing large transfers over the network, isn't the task split up over "threads"? So then those threads can then be split up over the network options available to get to the destination? (Of course I'm oversimplifying it, but I'm trying to get a point across while also trying to understand how it works - It's how I learn. lol)
It theoretically shouldn't be any different than transferring directly over a switch, like say what linus did in his most recent video (Vessel) or in this video crudely.
And in regards to saturating the connection with that RAId, I actually will as long as the RAID controller scales with at least 85% of the total performance of the drives in a perfect world scaled. Because each drive can get "Up To" 255MB/s transfers for single large files. Which, when there are 6 drives worth of read speed (Perfect world 1530MB/s) and 3 drives worth of write speed (Perfect World 765MB/s), I will get capped by the 10G, and it's not like the RAID config is the only thing that will be going on with it, so I would like some elbow room to deal with other things.
I realize I won't get these speeds, but I shouldn't be losing that much performance (5-10%) as long as the controller is good. Hence the making of this post :)
In that video linus is transferring files to multiple PCs, not one single connection.
This is new in SMB 4 and I really don't know much about it (this is only on windows 8 and up I think, I run a LAG on linux and BSD). It could be that it works fine without you having to do anything, or it might be that it only works for certain types of workloads. I really don't know.
Found it. Seems like it was actually added in SMB 3
"SMB Multichannel: Enables aggregation of network bandwidth and network fault tolerance if multiple paths are available between the SMB 3.0 client and the SMB 3.0 server. This enables server applications to take full advantage of all available network bandwidth and be resilient to a network failure."
And na, that was my bad. That video is a bad example. Linus' latest video has two computers, each has a 4 port PCIe card with a switch in-between. "Quadruple your network bandwidth for cheap" was the slogan for the video essentially.
I had been planning this for months now, but it was just a bad-timed handy example.
Ideally, this is meant to be my main PC's storage for everything but programs and games.
Edit: So, I have to ask a stupid question: What IS SMB? Is it build into windows? It it a Windows Server exclusive? Not quite sure what to think of it other than a feature for something I don't know what to.
It's the protocol that windows uses for network shares and all that. It's built in to windows, but SMB 3 (I was getting mixed up with with samba 4 which is the linux equivalent which has some of the SMB 3 features) is only in windows 8 and up.
So yeah, it should work, I'm not sure if you have to do any sort of tuning to get that sort of performance out of it or if it works for everything or not. But from what I've seen it does seem to work without you having to do anything other than set up the team.
I'm not so sure that RAID 10 works in a way which would give you 6 times the read performance, you will get 3 times (maybe) but I think that getting 6 times would depend on the RAID controller.
Everywhere I am looking says RAID 1 offers the same performance as RAID 0 for reads or even better than RAID 0 if the implementation is correct - Paralleled read implementation. But I guess I need to wait for someone who knows more about RAID controllers. :)
There's soo much conflicting info on RAID online .... :r