One of my first posts on the forum, so please excuse me if this is in the wrong section.
I have an existing NAS setup that is, to be frank, a dangerous thing to behold. It currently consists of an HP DL380G6 running 4 120GB SSDs and a single 2TB drive. I have configured the system to run a copy of Ubuntu Server paired with NFS and Bcache to serve as storage for my Esxi lab environment. The obvious issue is first, lack of storage space, and second, zero redundancy on my data.
I was planning on attaching an external enclosure to the server via an older desktop case paired with some SFF 8088 cables/breakout connections to the case. Throw in my drives and I’m all set! That’s all fine and dandy, however, after doing some reading, I found that the integrated controller (p410i) is notorious for dropping RAIDs and thrashing SSDs. My original plan was to pair this controller with an HP SAS expander, however, that looks to be a worse option.
My research has shown that a SAS HBA would be my best bet when using Storage Spaces, however, I can’t seem to get good information on bcache specifically. After doing some browsing on ebay, I found that the HP P812 might fit my needs, however, is a RAID controller versus an HBA. It does however contain a pair of internal and external SAS ports to fit my needs. Would there be a performance disadvantage to use this controller (Paired with RAID 1 on a pair of HDDs and RAID 0 on the SSDs) versus using ZFS with an HBA? Is there a downside to using individual RAID 0 volumes for each drive?
My goal is to be able to write to memory at 1GB/s as well as read from cache at 1GB/s on the system. I picked up a Quanta LB4M to connect this server to my ESXI system, so playing around with 10Gbe is part of what this project was thought up for.
I apologize in advance if this thread is redundant. I attempted to search the forum but came back with results that didn’t seem to apply to what I was looking for.
