Desperately seeking advice. I an in way over my head.

[SilverleafAspen]

We are working with a small jewelry business that uses lost wax casting to produce custom precious metal pieces.  There is not currently an online presence, but we are expanding into CAD design and will 3D print our molds.  Part of this project will be to document different processes as well as produce educational and instructional video content for a website (under development).  This will require setting up a proper small business network that supports shared video editing/rendering and is secure enough to develop and grow an eCommerce solution.

I have a background in Project Management and my wife has a Sys-Admin background with her strengths firmly in reporting, software solutions, integration, process Analysis, and optimization.  While she grasps technological concepts easily and has a general understanding of Networking and Hardware, there are a lot of inner-connected parts when setting up a system from scratch and we don't want to miss anything critical.

For example, recently we got some SAS HDD drives that are not compatible with our Motherboard as it only supports SATA drives.  So now we have 10 4Gb SAS drives that we can't use with our current system.

The current Plan is to get a network connected enclosure with a RAID controller that will be used for storage of b-roll and video edits and setup the onboard NVME RAID array to run Programs on and act as a working environment.  That way it will pull data from storage to process, then drop it back into storage when it is done.

In theory it seems like a good concept, but after missing something so detrimental as the difference between SAS and SATA drives, we want to make sure we have covered our bases.

We have narrowed down the  options and are thinking about  going with RAID 10 or 50.  Are there reasons for or against using these configurations?  Or is there a better option?

Is it cost effective for a small business to use an online service such as  Microsoft 365?  How complex is it to setup correctly? Would a better solution be a Windows Server 2019 network or another network operating system?

...And that doesn't even get me started on virtualization options like Hyper-V, VMWare, etc. My wife posted this on Spicewood and received some sound advice. However, what she failed to mention is that I have already put my life savings into this. So I can't afford, at this time, to start from scratch and build a Xeon or Epyc base server as she was advised. Any advise on how we can use our current hardware to accomplish our above mentioned goals would be greatly appreciated. I have a budget of $5000 to get everything at least functionally operational. If or when a profit is seen we can upgrade our equipment. 

 

Current System / System : X399 MSI Meg Creation, CPU: threadripper 1920x, 12 cores, 24 threads, Graphics: MSI RX Vega 56 8Gb OC, RAM: 64gb Quad channel ballistix sport 2666mhz, Cooling: Ennermax Liqtich II 360 AIO Storage: 2 x 2tb adata spg sx8200 pro nvme onboard4 and 4 x 2tb adata spg sx8200 pro nvme on Msi m.2 expander aero slotted into a PCIe x 8, and a 250gb samsung 970 Evo nvme (dedicated boot), 10 x 4tb HGST Enterprise SAS HDD (not connected), and finnally a D-Link DGS-1024D gigabit unmanaged desktop 24 port switch.

We've had this system for over a year. We just hoped to buy an obscene amount of storage and use bubble gum, duct tape it and wishes to turn it into what we need. I've since determined that calling geniuses and tech wizards is a far better idea.

[mariushm]

You can buy SAS adapter cards, which will allow you to connect 4 or 8 SAS drives directly to it, more using expanders, and use them like regular sata drives.

 

Example card :  https://www.unixplus.com/collections/raid-controllers/products/refurbished-lsi-megaraid-sas-8-port-6gb-s-sgl-raid-controller-lsi9261-8i

 

Example cable : https://www.amazon.com/CABLEDECONN-SFF-8087-SFF-8482-Connectors-Power/dp/B0894LLGV8

 

There's cheaper models, for example : https://www.unixplus.com/collections/raid-controllers/products/refurbished-lsi-sas-9207-8i-8-port-6gb-s-sas-sata-to-pci-e-internal-raid

 

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Servers and NAS

 

Also cleaned. If you don't have time or interest to read, don't post whining about it. Your contribution is not required, and you just wasting everyone's time.

[dizmo]

Not to say anything bad in regards to the members here, but I think you'll probably get better NAS help if you head over to level1techs forums.

Linus is constantly saying how he's a wizard when it comes to networking, and who knows, maybe you'll even be able to tag him on their forums and get some help from the master himself.

 

Do you own the jewelry company? Or is this something you're moonlighting?

I get that you're probably new to this, and you've invested a great deal, but from this point forward I really wouldn't take on something if you don't know what you're doing, at least from a business standpoint where you're collecting money for it. It's a great way to absolutely destroy your businesses reputation, as well as your own.

[Loki0111]

Going to be honest if this is for actual work and you are getting tripped on things like SAS versus SATA I dunno if this is really a venture you want to be taking on. There are COTS solutions which are easy to use and you don't have to worry about all the hardware and setup issues. You can poke over on Dell to take a look at some of them.

 

That said, if you are really going to do this I'd stick to Windows Server 2019, or Windows 10 Pro if you are mainly comfortable with Windows. Using a FreeBSD or Linux based solution is going to require the use of the command line and Unix based systems have their own syntax and way of doing things that is fairly different from Windows/DOS Cmdline.

 

If you are using Windows Server 2019 you won't be using conventional RAID setups, you can set something up similar to RAID 10 in Storage Spaces though. If you go the software RAID route I'd recommend an LSI HBA instead of a RAID controller. Of note, Storage Spaces on Windows Server 2019 is not what I would call super easy for a beginners. The GUI interface for it is only accessible via the Server Manager and it is what I'd classify as a "broken train wreck". To make a proper tiered storage array you are going to need to use the PowerShell and a little scripting. The only option to really avoid this would be using a RAID controller card which manages the array itself and side steps the problem, LSI has a number of good ones.

 

The end result of what you want to do is very doable though. You're probably looking at about an hour of work to set everything up if you know exactly what you are doing.

 

Sorry I can't give better news but figured its better to just be upfront about things. If you are dumping you life savings into this I'd build out as inexpensively as possible to start. If the business goes well you can always upgrade later.

[SilverleafAspen]

Thank you all that is great advise. In response to dizmo - It's not anything yet. We were trapped in the house due Covid. We had nothing but time and an idea. We wont LLC until every detail is fleshed out, tested, retested and running smoothly. If all else fails there's always ETSY. Response to Mariushm - I like the first link. Will it work with my system? Is it an HBA? Response to Loki0111 - I've spent years working with metals and my wife is very system savvy, just not so much hardware. Granted there is a large learning curve but as I've said we have nothing but time right now. dizmo linked a refurbished Lsi RAID controller. Is it safe to use a refurbished one? Also, I've seen SAS RAID controllers, SAS HSB's and SAS HSB RAID controllers is there difference? If you don't want to explain could you give a link? I am more than capable and willing to learn but finding the right wording for google can be daunting. Again thank you all for the advice.

[Loki0111]

An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. Much like your motherboard SATA controller it basically acts as a high speed SATA/SAS pass through device which you can connect any SATA/SAS device to.

 

The difference between an HBA and a RAID card is a RAID card will typically try to directly manage the drives itself and present them as a storage device to the OS. This gives the OS less control over the individual drives and no control over your array. The RAID card in many cases ties you to a specific brand of hardware, if one fails you need to replace it with another compatible card. An HBA just serves up the drives, the OS manages them. You can move those drives to any machine running compatible software and they should remount with no issue.

 

For something like FreeNAS because it uses zfs you'd definitely want to use an HBA. Windows Server 2019 is more of a mixed bag, I personally prefer HBA's and software RAID but I don't see why you could not just use a hardware RAID controller.

 

Physically they actually look somewhat similar and use the same types of fan out cables.

[SilverleafAspen]

Thank you again @Loki0111. I think that's how you do that. So HBA it is. Do you think refurbished is safe or should I just pony up the cash for a new one? Finally, do you recommend any particular adapter?

[mariushm]

Refurbished is fine. Probably more than 90% of the time, it just means they're pulled from servers that are taken out of datacenters to be replaced with more modern hardware that has the controller built into the motherboard or is a newer hba card. Often, they're spare parts or excess inventory of some companies (for example, a datacenter leases 1000 servers from dell and they only offer the cards as upgrades to a default configuration, so when the lease is over after 2-3 years, they recycle or sell the cards to a company that sells them as refurbished)

 

Loki's explanation is good... I linked to a "raid" card, because you said you wanted raid. It's proper raid card, with 512 MB of onboard cache memory, supports lots of kinds of raid and all that.

 

The same store also sells HBA cards, or raid cards that have two versions of the firmware ("bios"), one IT mode (where the card shows the drives in JBOD - just bunch of drives - to the operating system, so it's like a HBA card ) and a RAID mode.

For some models, the store is even letting you chose the mode it's pre-flashed to, for example see : https://www.unixplus.com/collections/raid-controllers/products/refurbished-lsi-9210-8i-8-port-6gb-s-sas-2-zfs-jbod-it-mode-hba

 

Most of them are fine to use, some of the cheapest are sold so cheap for reasons being too slow with SSDs because they use a pci-e 2.0 x8 which means you're limited to a bit under 4 GB/s for all drives.

Some of the cheapest may not have drivers for some Linux versions, or they're buggy under some Linux versions... some old "chipsets" may not have windows 10 support ...some basic google searches will give you recommendations on what chipsets work best with some operating systems but most will work fine with the major operating systems.

 

[SilverleafAspen]

On 8/8/2018 at 3:08 PM, chckovsky said:

No, but since many motherboards won't power on without a cpu fan attached they usually come with a "dummy" cpu fan header.

I think most modern AIOs have their own software which controls fan speed. So the AIO fans are connected to the AIO hub, which is again connected to motherboard via USB. My Corsair H115i does this at least.