Best use of a PERC H310 RAID card

[Cylon Agent]

So, I've been interested in evolving my data storage and complimenting backups with some sort of disk redundancy. Now, I'm not really experienced with this sort of thing and could use some direction on the best route to take i.e. FreeNAS, etc, In particular, I've this PERC H310 card I got out of a Blender workstation that features an LSI 2008 chip (https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/dell-perc-h310-spec-sheet.pdf), and am wondering if I should aim to use it as is in a RAID 1 configuration or flash it with LSI bios for use with FreeNAS. Again, not really sure what the pros and cons are here. For now, I'm thinking a two disk mirror though also entertaining a 4 disk setup. Im not so much looking to boost performance so much as ensure good redundancy.  Any advice? Thanks!

[Windows7ge]

That's really up to two factors.

1. What is the server going to be doing?
2. Personal preference.

For every application I've had Software RAID has been my go-to and really if you think about it Hardware RAID still runs software. It's just a matter of if the application warrants a dedicated processor to handle it.

 

Personally, if you want to play with FreeNAS you will want to flash it to IT mode. ZFS (The File System FreeNAS uses) wants direct access to the disks. It cannot do this behind a RAID controller.

 

I have a Dell PERC H310 as well. Flashed to IT mode. It worked well in my FreeNAS box for the time that I used it.

[Cylon Agent]

Thanks!  

 

As for what the server will be doing - simply holding a few TB of media, including my Steam library. 

 

Regarding flashing the RAID card's firmware - I'll look this up as I'm sure there are plenty of guides, but is this reversible?  Also, RAID 1 supports only two drives, yes? I'd best opt for RAID 6 or 10 if going with 4 drives... use parity instead of mirror? Basic questions, I know, but, never setup a RAID/NAS before. 

[2FA]

33 minutes ago, Cylon Agent said:

Also, RAID 1 supports only two drives, yes? I'd best opt for RAID 6 or 10 if going with 4 drives... use parity instead of mirror?

You can mirror more than two drives, but it's still only one drive worth of data. I personally have 4 drives with I have as ZFS striped mirrors, the equivalent of RAID10 because I wanted good IOPS less stress on the entire array if I have to resilver a disk.

[Windows7ge]

1 hour ago, Cylon Agent said:

Thanks!  

 

As for what the server will be doing - simply holding a few TB of media, including my Steam library. 

 

Regarding flashing the RAID card's firmware - I'll look this up as I'm sure there are plenty of guides, but is this reversible?  Also, RAID 1 supports only two drives, yes? I'd best opt for RAID 6 or 10 if going with 4 drives... use parity instead of mirror? Basic questions, I know, but, never setup a RAID/NAS before. 

Then software-wise FreeNAS would be fine. It supports a whole bunch of other features such as snapshots (in case you delete something you didn't mean to) and replication where you can backup a pool to another server locally or remotely.

 

Provided you have a copy of the original RAID card firmware I see no reason you can't restore it at a later date.

 

No. You could mirror basically as many disks as you like but it comes with no performance benefit unless you mix it with RAID0. Then like 2FA said you get much higher IOPS. This is good for things like Virtual Machines. If you don't mind taking a little performance hit you're probably best of with Parity RAID (raidz1, raidz2) better combination of fault tolerance/usable capacity.

 

If you only have 4 disks but want 2 drives worth of fault tolerance RAID10 would be better than RAID6.

[Cylon Agent]

Perfect. Last question. Is it a bad idea to mix different drives in an array i.e. four 6TB  drives with different cache sizes or even different RPMs? I'd imagine using different brands might help ensure they don't go bad simultaneously ...

 

Thanks!