server raid hardware and info help!!!

[platinum831]

hello so i have been looking at purchasing either a raid card or an external usb raid enclosure for use with my video/media/games server currently have just a few hard drives inside and am looking at upping my storage space for bigger things in the future looking at what you guys would go with whether i should go for an internal or external and why currently looking at https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-DS500U3-US-BK/dp/B0734G79FW/ref=sr_1_41?dchild=1&keywords=usb+raid+enclosure&qid=1601598100&sr=8-41 for external and https://www.amazon.com/MZHOU-Controller-Expansion-Marvell-88SE9215/dp/B082D6XSZN/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=raid+cards&qid=1601598058&sr=8-4 for internal 

[Electronics Wizardy]

How much storage do you need? What speeds do you need?

 

Do you want it internal or external?

 

Id suggest using software raid here, its normally much better than a raid card, esp that cheap raid card you selected.

[Radium_Angel]

53 minutes ago, platinum831 said:

hello so i have been looking at purchasing either a raid card or an external usb raid enclosure for use with my video/media/games server currently have just a few hard drives inside and am looking at upping my storage space for bigger things in the future looking at what you guys would go with whether i should go for an internal or external and why currently looking at https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-DS500U3-US-BK/dp/B0734G79FW/ref=sr_1_41?dchild=1&keywords=usb+raid+enclosure&qid=1601598100&sr=8-41 for external and https://www.amazon.com/MZHOU-Controller-Expansion-Marvell-88SE9215/dp/B082D6XSZN/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=raid+cards&qid=1601598058&sr=8-4 for internal 

That Orinco isn't RAID, unless I'm missing something, it's just a bunch of disks concatenated together. If you are looking for expansion, go for it, but if you need any kind of redundancy, I don' tthink that product provides. 

[platinum831]

44 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

That Orinco isn't RAID, unless I'm missing something, it's just a bunch of disks concatenated together. If you are looking for expansion, go for it, but if you need any kind of redundancy, I don' tthink that product provides. 

ahh yes thanks for pointing that out it is not a raid device just an external storage device

[platinum831]

45 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How much storage do you need? What speeds do you need?

 

Do you want it internal or external?

 

Id suggest using software raid here, its normally much better than a raid card, esp that cheap raid card you selected.

looking for up to 40tb if not more. I am going to be converting all of my media library music/dvds to digital i would like decent speeds as i will also be running servers on the same server.i would prefer internal storage as my 4u server case [rsv-r4000] has the space 

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 hours ago, platinum831 said:

looking for up to 40tb if not more. I am going to be converting all of my media library music/dvds to digital i would like decent speeds as i will also be running servers on the same server.i would prefer internal storage as my 4u server case [rsv-r4000] has the space 

How many free sata ports do you have? If you need more ports Id get a lsi hba.

 

Id get some big hdds, like the 16tb drives, then add as many as you need.

 

Setup software raid to manage the array, so zfs or mdadm in linux or storage spaces in windows.

[heimdali]

... or use btrfs.  Before I'd resort to ZFS, I'd get a RAID card.  If you can fit the disks into your server case, there's no reason not to put them in.  You may want to use a 10GB network card for the server and another one for your desktop: being limited to the 100MB/sec you get with 1GB sucks for this, especially when making backups.  But you can do that any time later.

 

An HBA/RAID card and a 10GB network card should each go into 8x slots.  Does the mainboard of the server have so many slots?

 

Keep in mind that using larger disks has advantages in that not as many disks can fail when there aren't as many, and they don't need as much power.  OTOH, more disks can be faster.

 

What do you do for backups?