Best Raid Controller Card for Home Media Server

[Pegasuz77]

I am planing on building a Raid 5 array for a home media server. 

I am planing on buying 3 or 4 WD Red 4TB drives to make the array. 

 

The specs for the computer I have to use are:

CPU:Intel Core i5-2400

MB: Itel DH67BL

RAM: 8 GB DDR3

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

 

I am currently using this computer to run a small media/backup server based off a single WD Black 2TB drive for storage and a single 64 GB SSD for the OS (leftover from an old build).

This computer has a UPS and is always left on. 

I use it to back up files from my main desktop machine and my laptop as well as back up pictures and movies from mine and my wife's phones. 

 

Up until recently this little 2TB system was working great but now I am starting to run out of space and need to upgrade. 

I also saw the LTT's video about a Plex server and thought I might try that. 

 

The problem with all of this is the MB in my server rig does not have that many SATAIII ports so to do this I will need a Raid controller and I have never worked with one before.

 

The things I do know:

Under $100 USD (I will swing as high as $150 if it is really worth it)

At least 4 SATAIII ports (maybe 8 for future proofing)

As to be able to do Raid 5 (that is the whole point of this)

Reliable. 

 

Any help would be awesome. 

Just pointing me at a safe brand name would be more than I know now. 

 

Thanks, 

 

[Arvi89]

I don't know about raid card, but having a raid 5 with 4 TB HDD is not a good idea, as if a disk fails, you might have another one that fails while you resilver the first one, then lose your data. It's highly not recommended today with high capacity HDD, you should consider a raid 6.

[Electronics Wizardy]

 

1 hour ago, Arvi89 said:

I don't know about raid card, but having a raid 5 with 4 TB HDD is not a good idea, as if a disk fails, you might have another one that fails while you resilver the first one, then lose your data. It's highly not recommended today with high capacity HDD, you should consider a raid 6.

If you have a backup i wouldn't worry about it.

 

 

For a raid card, id get a dell h700  off ebay. There under 100 and better than any cheap raid card, and have bbu's and rebranded lsi cards.

[Pegasuz77]

6 hours ago, Arvi89 said:

It's highly not recommended today with high capacity HDD, you should consider a raid 6.

There is nothing saved on this machine that I absolutely could not do without. 

All the data I have that I simply cannot loose is backed up on multiple machines in multiple locations and on cloud storage like OneDrive and Google Drive. 

The only reason I am doing a Raid 5 at all is because it would be mildly annoying to loose some of this data but not enough for me to spend time and money backing it up more securely. I would rather have the additional capacity of the Raid 5 configuration. 

 

4 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

For a raid card, id get a dell h700  off ebay

I did a little looking into the H700 and it appears they are meant to be screwed flat against a special server MB. 

I am not sure I would be able to properly secure it in my current rig. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, Pegasuz77 said:

There is nothing saved on this machine that I absolutely could not do without. 

All the data I have that I simply cannot loose is backed up on multiple machines in multiple locations and on cloud storage like OneDrive and Google Drive. 

The only reason I am doing a Raid 5 at all is because it would be mildly annoying to loose some of this data but not enough for me to spend time and money backing it up more securely. I would rather have the additional capacity of the Raid 5 configuration. 

 

I did a little looking into the H700 and it appears they are meant to be screwed flat against a special server MB. 

I am not sure I would be able to properly secure it in my current rig. 

 

You can get them with the pcie bracket, like this one http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PERC-H700-6Gb-s-SAS-PCI-e-RAID-Controller-w-512MB-J9MR2-R310-R410-T310-T410-/162129583853?hash=item25bfad1eed:g:nqQAAOSwEjFXfs8Q

[AshleyAshes]

I honestly don't really get using RAID5 or anything like that for backups of 'Media Files' for HTPC purposes.  Media collections tend to grow and a lot of the RAID solutions don't offer expandability and are kind of overkill for 'Media Files'.

I recently implemented FlexRAID which is a snapshot based parity system.  It seems ideal for adding parity to a media collection.  Simpy put  it will pool multiple drives and there must be one or more parity drives that must be at equal or larger size than any of the storage drives.  You can survive as many drive failures as you have parity drives. Also, even if parity fails by some critical means, any files on unfailed storage drives remains intact.  You have no limited of the number of storage drives and can add empty drives to expand the parity protected pool at will.  Now, this is a snapshot system so if you have a failure you can't recover files that were placed between the last time the snapshot was updated and the failure.  But for that kind of 'media collection', even if you lose say a weeks worth of added files you can just 'acquire' them again easily.  This seems WAY more practical for media, which is data that's not nearly that important and more just a pain in the butt to entirely replace.  I wouldn't use it for creative or business storage, no, but it's ideal for this kind of role.

 

The downside is, my server is having a fun time trying to compute the initial parity data for about 18TB of files.

[Pegasuz77]

18 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can get them with the pcie bracket

Awesome. I did not see those before. 

 

14 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

I honestly don't really get using RAID5 or anything like that for backups of 'Media Files' for HTPC purposes.  Media collections tend to grow and a lot of the RAID solutions don't offer expandability and are kind of overkill for 'Media Files'.

I recently implemented FlexRAID which is a snapshot based parity system.  It seems ideal for adding parity to a media collection.

I am not familiar with this type of system. 

Do you still get the improved read performance (over a single drive) that Raid 5/6 would give?

 

And am I understanding correctly when you say

14 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

Simpy put  it will pool multiple drives and there must be one or more parity drives that must be at equal or larger size than any of the storage drives.

I can have  1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB data drives all "pooled" together and as long as I have just an additional single 4 TB parity drive thrown in the system it will give me level 1 parity protection over the 4 random sized data drives? And adding a second 4 TB parity drive will give me level 2 parity protection? (and so on....) 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Pegasuz77 said:

I am not familiar with this type of system. 

Do you still get the improved read performance (over a single drive) that Raid 5/6 would give?

These normally work by having a drive pool. You fill up one drive, then the next fills, then the next. The biggest drive is used as a parity and makes it so any drive can fail.

 

The advantages are

-The files are on the bare drive, so if you lose all the drives but one, you still have some data, unlike raid 5 where if you lose 2 drives, its all gone

-You can mix drive sizes

-You don't need much cpu power or a hardware raid card.

 

The disadvantages are 

-Normally limited to one drives write/read speed(thats why ssd caches are often used)

-Redundancy is often not realtime, so it only refreshes the cache at night

 

 

4 minutes ago, Pegasuz77 said:

RAID solutions don't offer expandability and are kind of overkill for 'Media Files'.

Most raid card and raid software also let you expand them.

 

 

[scottyseng]

14 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

I honestly don't really get using RAID5 or anything like that for backups of 'Media Files' for HTPC purposes.  Media collections tend to grow and a lot of the RAID solutions don't offer expandability and are kind of overkill for 'Media Files'.

For LSI cards, RAID 5/6 are expandable. RAID 0, 1, 10, 50, 60 are not. I personally run RAID6 on my server. I think for a array this small though, I'd learn towards software RAID (As you mention, flex RAID).

[AshleyAshes]

45 minutes ago, Pegasuz77 said:

Awesome. I did not see those before. 

 

I am not familiar with this type of system. 

Do you still get the improved read performance (over a single drive) that Raid 5/6 would give?

 

And am I understanding correctly when you say

I can have  1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB data drives all "pooled" together and as long as I have just an additional single 4 TB parity drive thrown in the system it will give me level 1 parity protection over the 4 random sized data drives? And adding a second 4 TB parity drive will give me level 2 parity protection? (and so on....) 

No, there is no performance improvement over a singe disk, but even a laptop 5400rpm 2.5" drive can saturate a 1gbit network connection, so its more performance than any home could need.

 

And yes, you can mix any size drive, I use 1x500gb, 1x1tb, 4x4tb and 1x8tb, plus an 8tb parity drive.  Older drives can be pulled and replaced with larger drives and you can replace your parity drive with a larger one if you want to use larger storage drives.  ( but you'd have to recalculate all your parity data from scratch)

[AshleyAshes]

5 hours ago, scottyseng said:

For LSI cards, RAID 5/6 are expandable. RAID 0, 1, 10, 50, 60 are not. I personally run RAID6 on my server. I think for a array this small though, I'd learn towards software RAID (As you mention, flex RAID).

Yeah, I'm able to use cheap as chips PCIE-1 1x four port SATA controllers.  Again, using big mech drives, so long as I can saturate 1gbit, performance beyond that is irrelevant.  I'm sure such a controller would bottleneck an SSD if it was being used for software on the local system, but for just media files accessed over the network, it's more than enough.

 

But this certainly this isn't ideal for 'important' data.  In my case, between the $80 CAD spent on FlexRAID and $269 CAD spent on an 8TB parity drive, that's as much as I'm willing to spend on, let's admit it, a giant hoard of pirated media.  Even with snap shots, if I lose a weeks worth of data by only doing weekly snapshots, big deal, I can redownload that stuff from source.

[scottyseng]

4 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

-snip-

Yeah, I would agree, a HBA card or some passthrough SATA card with software RAID is much cheaper. Back when I first needed to join drives, FreeNAS and FlexRAID weren't as popular (and I had no idea they existed), and the norm was to buy a hardware RAID controller, so I bought a 50% off LSI 9260-8i ($350...full price was $700). It literally cost the same as getting another two drives (At the time, this controller only handled four 4TB drive). However, I got myself a proper server with a proper SAS backplane and the RAID card is now actually being used to manage my two larger arrays (Six 4TB drives in RAID6 and eight 4TB Drives in RAID6).

 

It's still depressing that my larger eight 4TB drive array can crack 1GB/s for sequential read and write, but it's stuck at 125MB/s (Usually 100MB/s) due to 1GB/s Ethernet...

 

Also, people tend to forget that the good hardware RAID controllers are the ones with the onboard batteries (Usually aren't cheap)...the really cheap entry level four port ones are really just software RAID on a card that still need to borrow system RAM to operate.

[mariushm]

I was always found of areca hardware raid controllers, they're expensive though.

Best value for money would be a 16 port SATA3 controller areca ARC-1264IL-16, priced at $600 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151139&ignorebbr=1

It's a good value for a 16 port card, especially considering it has 4 mini-SAS cables included in the package, 1GB of memory onboard, management, it's overall a great card. But since it looks like you want just RAID5 (or maybe RAID6), it's overkill for you.

Sadly, newegg doesn't have anything between a cheap and basic 2 port card, and expensive 8-16 port cards from areca.

 

If you want something cheap and simple, you could check out the 4 port HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card :  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115029&ignorebbr=1

It's a basic HBA card using a Marvell chip which uses the processor for xor and stripping calculations, so it will use a bit of cpu if you're constantly writing and reading at high speeds, but since you plan to have a HTPC and basically be limited by the network card speed, you should be fine.

Otherwise, your hard drives will be connected at SATA 2 speeds (300 MB/s max) but classic hard drives barely go over 200 MB/s these days so it's not an issue, and the whole bus interface is pci-e x1 which means the whole raid will be limited to 500 MB/s - you may hit this with 4 x 4TB drives in raid5 but again, for a home media center thing you won't care since the network card caps you at 1gbps (125MB/s)

 

Another HBA that looks good is HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL PCI-Express 2.0 x8 Low Profile SATA / SAS Controller Card : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115100&ignorebbr=1

 

It's based on Marvell 9485, it's a decent HBA with good bandwidth to the system (x8), supports up 8 drives. Besides the $160 price, you'd have to pay for two mini-SAS cables worth about 20$ each  so the total price is a bit higher at the end, at around $200.  Still, it's a good value for a 8 port card which supports RAID5 and RAID6.

If you're interested you can further check out a review on Toms Hardware ... check the conclusions and keep in mind the price compared to other cards in the review: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sas-6gb-raid-controller,3028-6.html

 

Besides these, i'd encourage you to check out cards from areca (maybe you find some 4 port models on other stores as newegg doesn't seem to have them) and LSI and even adaptec (though i kinda feel like you're paying a bit for the brand name these days)

 

As for hard drives, i'm not so fond of WD Red drives, I'd suggest going with HGST NAS drives, they seem more reliable to me. They're only about 10$ more, but they run at 7200 rpm and overall there should be more throughput from them : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822145912

[Pegasuz77]

After reading AshleyAshes and Electronics Wizardys posts

On 9/6/2016 at 8:19 PM, AshleyAshes said:

 

I honestly don't really get using RAID5 or anything like that for backups of 'Media Files' for HTPC purposes.  Media collections tend to grow and a lot of the RAID solutions don't offer expandability and are kind of overkill for 'Media Files'.

I recently implemented FlexRAID which is a snapshot based parity system.  It seems ideal for adding parity to a media collection.

 

 

On 9/7/2016 at 10:40 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

The advantages are

-The files are on the bare drive, so if you lose all the drives but one, you still have some data, unlike raid 5 where if you lose 2 drives, its all gone

-You can mix drive sizes

-You don't need much cpu power or a hardware raid card.

 

The disadvantages are 

-Normally limited to one drives write/read speed(thats why ssd caches are often used)

-Redundancy is often not realtime, so it only refreshes the cache at night

 

And doing a little more research I am completely rethinking all my plans. 

 

The next big question I had was do I still need a hardware raid controller if I no longer plan on doing raid 5?

Then this post by scottyseng popped up. 

13 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Yeah, I would agree, a HBA card or some passthrough SATA card with software RAID is much cheaper.

So the next big question would be what is the best SATA card for my situation. 

Then the most helpful and well thought out forum post I have ever seen in my life was waiting for me this morning. 

10 hours ago, mariushm said:

If you want something cheap and simple, you could check out the 4 port HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card :  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115029&ignorebbr=1

mariushm you are a god among mortals. 

 

I think this is exactly what I am looking for (now). 

 

The greatest thing I like about this card is it is only a PCIe x1 interface. 

The MB I have as two PCIe x1 slots and only one PCIe x16 slot. 

I was hoping one day to be able to add a 4K capable dedicated GPU to this rig (once I an afford a 4K TV anyway). 

When I was first looking into raid cards they all appeared to be at least PCIe x4 or larger and would have to take up my one and only PCIe x16 slot. 

I had given up on a dedicated GPU at that point... but hope is returning. 

 

Am I correct in thinking I will be able to run at least one HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card (Possible two if I for some reason ever need more storage in the future?)

And be able to run a 4K capable dedicated GPU in the PCIe x16 slot of my Intel DH67BL MB at the same time?

 

If that all pans out I, only have one other concern. 

What is the maximum compatible storage size that card can handle?

Just in case I would like to do something like AshleyAshes did and buy an 8TB drive. 

18 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

$80 CAD spent on FlexRAID and $269 CAD spent on an 8TB parity drive

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Pegasuz77 said:

So the next big question would be what is the best SATA card for my situation. 

Id get something like a dell h700(or h300 for just hba) off ebay. They will work fine as a hba and are much better than those cheap sata cards.

[mariushm]

I never used FlexRAID so I can't tell you for sure, but it may be possible to use the existing SATA ports on that motherboard to create some kind of storage with backup/parity.

 

As for answers related to my post... yes, that 2300 controller is on pci-e x1 , you can install more than one in your computer without issues, yes it supports hard drives bigger than 2 TB (there a compatibility document on their website where they tested the controller with hard drives up to 3 TB)

 

As for video, if you're interested in something cheap and good for media player computer, I'd suggest an AMD RX 460 video card, because they have hardware video decoders for the popular codecs h264/AVC , HEVC, VP9 etc and the connectors on the card support 4k @ 60 Hz (hdmi 2.0, displayport etc) and the power consumption is low (about 60 watts, less when idle)

[AshleyAshes]

For FlexRAID and a lot of similar situations you have no need for a big fancy RAID card.  You can use the ones built into your mobo, when you run out, you can add more HBA controller cards for like $30-$40 each.  ANd you can use all the controllers at once.  It won't be the FASTEST setup in history, but it'll be enough to saturate a 1gbit home network and it'll be very affordable.

[bobhays]

On 9/6/2016 at 7:47 AM, Pegasuz77 said:

I am planing on building a Raid 5 array for a home media server. 

I am planing on buying 3 or 4 WD Red 4TB drives to make the array. 

 

The specs for the computer I have to use are:

CPU:Intel Core i5-2400

MB: Itel DH67BL

RAM: 8 GB DDR3

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

 

I am currently using this computer to run a small media/backup server based off a single WD Black 2TB drive for storage and a single 64 GB SSD for the OS (leftover from an old build).

This computer has a UPS and is always left on. 

I use it to back up files from my main desktop machine and my laptop as well as back up pictures and movies from mine and my wife's phones. 

 

Up until recently this little 2TB system was working great but now I am starting to run out of space and need to upgrade. 

I also saw the LTT's video about a Plex server and thought I might try that. 

 

The problem with all of this is the MB in my server rig does not have that many SATAIII ports so to do this I will need a Raid controller and I have never worked with one before.

 

The things I do know:

Under $100 USD (I will swing as high as $150 if it is really worth it)

At least 4 SATAIII ports (maybe 8 for future proofing)

As to be able to do Raid 5 (that is the whole point of this)

Reliable. 

 

Any help would be awesome. 

Just pointing me at a safe brand name would be more than I know now. 

 

Thanks, 

 

Why do you need sata 3 for had? Sata 2 is just fine. 

[Pegasuz77]

Thanks everyone for the help. 

Sorry for the long wait between replies. (Work blew up in my face)

I decided to go ahead and try out the software over at flexRAID

For now I ordered a cheap IO Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 Controller Card Marvell Non-Raid with Low Profile Bracket SI-PEX40064

I figured I would run something cheap and see if I like this setup first. (Either it works or it wont right?)

If I don't like the flexRAID trial or the performance of this system then at most I am out 30 USD and can move on to bigger and better things. 

And if all goes well maybe I can throw the rest of my budget into a dedicated GPU.

[FuzzyLobster]

On 9/16/2016 at 9:37 AM, Pegasuz77 said:

Thanks everyone for the help. 

Sorry for the long wait between replies. (Work blew up in my face)

I decided to go ahead and try out the software over at flexRAID

For now I ordered a cheap IO Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 Controller Card Marvell Non-Raid with Low Profile Bracket SI-PEX40064

I figured I would run something cheap and see if I like this setup first. (Either it works or it wont right?)

If I don't like the flexRAID trial or the performance of this system then at most I am out 30 USD and can move on to bigger and better things. 

And if all goes well maybe I can throw the rest of my budget into a dedicated GPU.

How has Flexraid been?