Raid Card Help

[tjrose91]

I was needing help trying to find a cheap pcie raid card that supports larger than 2tb hard drives I received a Dell poweredge t410 basically for free when I bought a bunch of computers off auction and sold them pretty much for the same price I bought them for plus a little extra about $140 extra, Anyways I decided to keep the server that came up the auction and now I'm trying to find a decent raid card that supports hard drive larger than 2tb since the included raid card only maxes out at 2 the and my main gaming rig has 3x10tb barracuda pro and raid 5 and I wanted to build a server PC I don't really care about the specs as long as it works. I plan to do 6x4tb HDDs ironwolfs in raid 5, any idea

[Electronics Wizardy]

Look at the dell h700.

 

Also id get fewer bigger drives, so go 8tb instaed of 4tb here.

[tjrose91]

On 1/26/2019 at 3:51 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Look at the dell h700.

 

Also id get fewer bigger drives, so go 8tb instaed of 4tb here.

i am somewhat on a budged and plan to do a Raid 5 config since that what im comfortable with , since my main rig is 3x10tb HDD effectively having 20tb, and with the Dell Poweredge t410, it would allow me to do a 6x4tb config and still have 20tb, if i went 8tb i would only have 16tb , i bee doing more and more video edition and conversions

[paddy-stone]

Do you actually need a RAID card, or do you mean just for the ports? if it's for the ports I recommend the LSI 9211-8i which gives you 2 SAS ports 8087, that using a breakout cable, gives you 8x sata ports. The card itself is physically a 4x pci-e card IIRC... they go for around £40 or so on ebay for new card.

IIRC software raid would be better, but I am not an expert on RAID anyway, so someone may correct my statement if needed.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, tjrose91 said:

i am somewhat on a budged and plan to do a Raid 5 config since that what im comfortable with , since my main rig is 3x10tb HDD effectively having 20tb, and with the Dell Poweredge t410, it would allow me to do a 6x4tb config and still have 20tb, if i went 8tb i would only have 16tb , i bee doing more and more video edition and conversions

how would 8tb drives give you less space? start with 4x 8tb drives. Gives you about 24tb of space, using less drives and costing about the sam.e

[tjrose91]

yes i actually do need a raid card and i would prefer doing 4tb hard drives since my main rig is 3x10tb in raid 5 giving me only 20tb of Space or 18.1tb of space and thats the reason why i wanted to go with 4x6tb HDDs since i would effectively have 20tb of HDD space on both systems and be easier on my end with my little experience dealing with servers and what not, i mean im pretty knowledgeable on PC in general just not so much servers, but its easier in my minds to keep both systems having the same amount of space than having my main pc with 20tb of space and the other with 24tb of space, knowing that i will never use that 4tb of space , i do know i will need at least 32gb of ecc ram 

[tjrose91]

and before i forget do i need an battery backup with getting a new card this set up is is necessary, i do plan to have the system shut off at night 8hrs 

[Jarsky]

3 hours ago, tjrose91 said:

 i do know i will need at least 32gb of ecc ram 

 

Why do you need 32gb of ecc ram? Does your server already have 32gb?

If you're going to just be using the server as a file server with hardware RAID you don't need that much memory at all 

 

3 hours ago, tjrose91 said:

and before i forget do i need an battery backup with getting a new card this set up is is necessary, i do plan to have the system shut off at night 8hrs 

If you're running hardware RAID, you should use a BBU so you can safely enable Write-through.

Otherwise you will be stuck on lower performance with Write-back, or you risk data loss enabling write-through without it. 

The BBU also protects your RAID configuration data in the event of sudden power loss. 

 

Since you seem very new to hardware RAID, i'd also recommend you when you do your RAID5, just use the default values for everything other than the Read/Write policies. That way if you do have any sort of configuration failure its easy to recreate. If you're using an H200/H700 raid controller, i'd also recommend using MegaRaid manager to save a backup of the raid config file somewhere. 

[tjrose91]

thats what i been doing with my 3x10tb in raid 5 setup since they are seagate pro drives with data warranty

[tjrose91]

and i would prefer to keep the same connectors for my next card for cable management, since this connector as as power and data since the cords are fed thru to each driver for power then stops on the forth drive or second depending on the cable

[tjrose91]

and going with 24tb of ram, depending on the OS i use like i think freenas calls for 1gb of ecc ram per tb of storage, and 32 is overkill but if have 24tb i still could still add two more HDD going to 30tb since i plan to turn my 3x10tb hdds into raid 0 when the warranty expires, then get newer drives for the server that has data warrenty from seagate