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I've been watching LTT for a long, LONG time... well not really, but for at least 3 years. During that time I went from living in rental homes to owning and living in a fifth wheel travel trailer, so I held off on building my first PC. Once I was settled in, I decided it was time to upgrade from my 2014 MSI laptop. My space, although not insanely limited, does not lend itself well to large form factor builds with custom water loops. I opted instead for a custom cabinet mounted set up with air cooling. Components were chosen mainly based on price, compatibility, and intended use. I went with what I considered to be fairly middle of the road components as I don't do heavy online gaming or streaming. I did want a safe storage system for the multiple TBs of movies, music, photos, and personal documents I've acquired over the years and opted for a raid 6 array. I hadn't really considered posting this build anywhere so I didn't take a bunch of photos during the building process. I started with a cheapo computer case to ensure components were functional before starting any real installation. If anyone wants any additional information on specifics, I'll be more than happy to accommodate with photos and explanations. Possible issues still to be addressed are cooling (resolution for now is leaving a cabinet door open) and the low end TCL TV that came with the trailer. At the time of posting, I am formatting the raid 6 array and the 2nd M.2 SSD is en route courtesy of Amazon. Primary uses are light work at home, offline gaming, watching movies, and data storage. Let me know what you think/what you would do differently. https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Radar416/saved/ZQ2cTW Mobo: Asus Prime x570-P CPU: Ryzen 5 3600 GPU: MSI GTX 1660 Super 6GB (hindsight would have chosen an Asus for easier RGB integration) RAM: G.Skill Trident RGB 8GB (x4) SSD1: Samsung EVO 960 1TB M.2 (Windows 10 Pro OS) SSD2: Samsung EVO 960 Plus 2TB M.2 (Steam Library) PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower iRGB Plus Platinum 850 Adaptec 8805 Raid Controller Seagate IronWolf NAS 8TB HDD x6 Odds and Ends: Modular power supply cable extensions, disassembled Chinese test bench frame, remote power button, USB 3 extension cables, Noctua chromax fans, and a metric (colorful expletive) load of zipties.

Seeking some advice and recommendations. This is my first post, so please forgive me if this is in the wrong section. I am wanting to purchase an external hardware RAID 6 enclosure. Ideally, this will contain the option to go to RAID 60. If there is a way to dynamically address the volume size to expand the RAID upon replacement of drives. This was a pet project until last week when my mom passed away. Now I am needing something ASAP to make sure photos and other data is not lost. Sadly, as always, budget is a concern. Thanks in advance for all your help and guidance.

So basically I'm hoping to get a new server with a xeon e5-1650 v4 and it will serve as a file server that can be accessed over the internet and also i'm gonna game on it. That being said, it would have a samsung 960 Evo(edit) m.2 drive as the boot drive and 5 toshiba p300 3tb 7200rpm drives in raid 6, 64gb ram and hopefully (but not necessarily) an additional 3tb hdd to store my games. So, i browsed a whole selection of motherboards, but all have bad reviews either regarding compatibility with xeons or raid 6. So, if anyone has hdd's in raid 6 paired with a xeon e5, could you please recommend me a board that fits my requirements. Also, i don't have a spare haswell-e processor to upgrade my bios so i need a mobo that can post straight from a usb without a cpu installed. THANKS!! All help appreciated!!

Preface: I am not a pro, just showing what I found. So I obtained a Dell R610, dual Intel Xeon L5520, put in 47GB DDR3 1600 RAM (yes I know it's a 1066 MHz FSB, this ram actually had a lower CAS than the 1066 kit somehow and was the same price), put in six Seagate Savvio 10K.6 ST300MM0026 300GB 2.5" SAS 6Gb/s 10KRPM drives LINK, installed a PERC H700, got an iDRAC 6 card, Windows Server 2012 R2 standard and some CALs and fired 'er up. Keep in mind this is my first server rodeo, so far I think I'm doing pretty good. I did a lot of research on RAID configurations and decided I think I want to go with a RAID 10 array due to most of my workload being reads and the writes will mostly be random, but I wanted to be sure. So I first configured a single full size RAID 6 array, did a full initialize, did a fresh install of the OS and BAM here are the results, sorry this is a pic from my phone, I was on the KVM console and didn't have time to play around with snipping tool/ email etc.: (ignore the 15KRPM note, I for some reason thought they were 15K drives doing these tests lolol) Not too shabby right? Well I then rebooted the server, fired up the RAID card deleted the VD, created a full size RAID 10 array, did a full initialize, installed the OS and here are the results from that test: (this one I did through the iDRAC so I could use snipping tool haha): So here's what's troubling.. All seq. work, reads and writes, are slower on RAID 10, at a queue depth of 32 they are dramatically slower, at a 0 queue they are only a tad slower. 4k reads are, sure, twice as fast but onlt 2.4MB/s? 4K writes are indeed faster by an almost factor of 4, but the 4KQD32 results are atrocious, reads a full 1MB/s slower than a RAID 6? The only result I am happy about are the 4kQD32 writes, 23MB/s is pretty fast, relatively speaking. At the end of the day I was seriously hoping for sequential reads/ writes of 1GB/s on this array, unless I'm totally missing something, this array should be able to hit those marks on a RAID 10 config, and quite possibly close on a RAID 6 config as well. My question to you all, and the point of the thread, is this, shouldn't the RAID 10 results be overall better than RAID 6 at this size? And for all those curious, yes I did full initializes before installing the OS, battery backed write back cache is on, adaptive read ahead is on, and the strip size is 64KB. If anyone has any thoughts or questions, please post, I'm curious to see what others have to think! Thank you!

I am trying to create either a raid 5, or a raid 6 array in my new R730XD running Windows Server 2019, but I am running into a problem. I can create a simple (raid 0), and a mirrored (raid 1) array just fine, but when I try to use any kind of parity I receive an odd error. It errors and says: "The storage pool does not have sufficient eligible resources for the creation of the specified virtual disk." I have 8 x 14TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives in the machine, and I am trying to create the raid array with four of them, using a fifth for a hot spare. Please Help! I am testing this out now, and must get this working before I deploy it to a client.

I sometimes come across free or cheap electronics, and then I proceed to spend money on implementing them with absurd fervor. So I was looking through some old equipment and checking the benchmarks for their procs and I found a few that had pretty good scores. I was given 6 E5-2660 Xeon processors, and this kickstarted my search for how to use them. Step 1: The Board Without putting too much thought into it, I found a board that would fit the processors with an astonishing amount of RAM slots. The X9DR3-LN4F+ seemed like a good choice at first. (I thought it was an EATX mobo.) I figured I would just slap some RAM in it and throw it in a case with a power supply and be off to the races. Too good to be true. I found 128 GB DDR3 1066 MHz (8x16GB) of Samsung memory, and based on what I have read about how this memory works on this board, I am right around the sweet spot for the speed/quantity ratio. I also got a PCI-E adapter for a 250 GB NVME drive along with a 4 TB full size HDD. I am going to see if I can boot through the PCI-E, but I am not sure if that will work. Step 2: The Case After fiddling with an ATX and EATX case, and realizing I was not going to get full use out of the board without some serious rigging, I bit the bullet and went for the CSE-745TQ-R920B. I am still waiting on the case to be delivered, so I am still working on planning the setup. Step 3: 8xSAS Backplane Realizing that there was going to be some empty slots to fill in the front of the case, I grabbed two of the connectors from SuperMicro's site along with 10 3TB SAS drives. (2 for hot swapping if needed.) It looks like you can work the storage through the BIOS. I don't have much experience with this, but after doing some research I found that an 8x3TB RAID 6 setup would allow for the use of 18TB with up to 2 drive failures at a time. Step 4: Power I am not sure what to say about this case, but it is a 4U tower case. (4u when laid on its side) The case was the most expensive thing, and I think that this is because of the 2 920 watt gold standard 90% efficiency power supplies. It will be interesting to see what the actual power draw is as I want to place it next to my networking equipment. Considerations: I have a handful of NUC's that are capped out with memory/proc/storage and I have been running Xenserver (Now Citrix Hypervisor) on one of these for the last 9 months. I think I want to run Server 2016 on this new setup so I can work with some Hyper-V and VMware. I am in a master's program right now studying cybersecurity and I think that being able to spin up vm's to test/practice the latest exploits will help to hone my admin/ethical hacking skills. But with the amount of resources available on this server, I can't justify not also using it for a NAS as well. I know the Server 2016 isn't going to be on the compatibility list, so I might have to revert to running bare metal Citrix Hypervisor to get the ball rolling. If anyone has some tips for setting up RAID6, implementing Citrix Hypervisor (CentOS?), or what type of networking I should be doing so I can manage the iPMI/BMC features without breaking the bank that would be great. Also if you have any advice on the load I can look forward to with the redundant power supply that would help too.

I am configuring a raid 6 for my Plex server. How does this work if my total storage data exceeds the Parity which is 8TB and if so how dows the Parity acrurally works

Can we do apples to apples comparison of RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 10? I'm a noob to this, It will be better if members here are little comprehensive. Thank you.

Theoretically for a large sample drive (for music software), what would be better? If I were to get 8x 1TB SSDs, should I get an LSI Raid card to deal with Raid 6 or 10 (I like the capacity of raid 6 but have seen that it could come with some cost too? something about calculation times etc?) Or, should I just get a SATA card (similar to a Raid card but without extensive raid functionality) and have an additional 8x SSDs in my computer, then spread my libraries out across these so that when I start a session I'm writing data to the RAM from multiple places. Would this still create data bottlenecks? Thanks

I've built several PCs but never a RAID server. In fact (quite embarassingly I've never used RAID before). Basically I am not sure where to start, since the requirements for a server are so different from a PC. This server would not be used as a final backup solution, but rather for video footage storage while working, and short term storage. Final backup would be onto LTO drives. I know I want enterprise grade drives with UREs at least 10^15, but beyond that not much. So what I don't know about is: CPU: Probably a Xeon Motherboard: Never shopped for a server mobo before, not sure. Memory: I'm assuming something with ECC, but not sure how much RAID Controller: No clue about good brands / types here either OS: Not sure, maybe FreeNAS? My main consideration is driver compatibility for any interface cards I'd be installing now and in the future, such as Thunderbolt III or whatever. Array: Probably going to use RAID 6, but was thinking about ZFS because I hear good things about it. Anyone want to point me in the right direction?