flibberdipper

8 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Should work. You picked a rather long 4U chassis. I would check the minimum depth of the rail kit and make sure you can adjust the rack rails long enough. Otherwise you won't be able to install the rail kit (an issue I nearly ran into with my own rack).

 

Based on what I'm reading the LSI 9211-8i RAID controller should be OK for that. I think it supports a JBOD mode. Personally I would have opted for the LSI 9207-8i HBA.

 

And peoples performance arguments would be due to parity RAID. I tried a RAID6 config in Storage Spaces made out of SSD's and the performance was beyond abysmal but I've been told in newer Windows releases the performance has improved. RAID10 works polynomial though performance wise. You could also use tiered storage so you have a really fast write cache.

 

If whatever you have works well for you though I won't try to convince you otherwise.

Yep, the one set of iStarUSA? rails I've got bookmarked is pretty much the defacto standard for that Rosewill case and pretty much any regular rack from what I've been able to gather.

As far as storage is concerned, the 9211's can be flashed for ol' IT mode which gets rid of hardware RAID in favor of just being a fancy SATA controller (fine by me, that's exactly what I need lol). And in the way of Storage Spaces, the parity mode has better read speeds but subpar write speeds compared to the simple and mirrored counterparts. Hell, the write speeds are worse than just a single drive, but still close enough to saturating gigabit that I don't care (and obviously reading is capable of saturating gigabit and then some).

Thankfully I won't really be writing to the general storage space too much, as I'll have that single 1TB drive to constantly cycle data through, occasionally going through it and figuring out if shit is worthy of being shuffled to the space or not.

Sometimes you have to watch out with short depth racks. Or if the chassis supports multiple rail kits like my NORCO chassis. They have 20"/24"/26" (I believe, didn't verify this) variants.

And of course me being me I buy the 26" thinking that's what I needed for my ~26" server...should have gone with the 24"'s.

And yeah that should work out fine. Out of curiosity though what are some of your horror stories with Linux?

1 hour ago, Windows7ge said:

Sometimes you have to watch out with short depth racks. Or if the chassis supports multiple rail kits like my NORCO chassis. They have 20"/24"/26" (I believe, didn't verify this) variants.

 

And of course me being me I buy the 26" thinking that's what I needed for my ~26" server...should have gone with the 24"'s.

 

And yeah that should work out fine. Out of curiosity though what are some of your horror stories with Linux?

The rack I've ultimately decided on (since the closed one is a no-go black sheep) is one of those "cheap" adjustable StarTech ones so thankfully size won't be an issue. And of course it's not really the end of the world that it's open, since I can real easily just grab some 1/8th inch aluminum sheets, paint them black, and slap 'em on.

And it's really just all over the board and never ever consistent, regardless of distro. Usually though it boils down to one of two things: SMB transfer speeds being half (or less) of what they are on Windows with very well supported hardware, or just downright refusing to acknowledge that SMB shares are a thing.

Good example of this is my Laptop on Kubuntu where (after a day of fiddle-fucking around) I finally got my shares to work reliably, and the transfer speeds are just under half what they were on Windows (with the 7260 for wireless and some Intel gigabit chip). But it runs a little faster, is a bit nicer to the battery, and saves a good chunk of space on the little 120GB SSD over Windows (not to mention that my laptop just despises Windows 8.1/10 for no reason in particular).