Anyone know of a good pcie sata card that will support 8 drives in raid 5?

[Owsleygarcia95]

I've never built a raid or a nas. Trying to learn all the basics. I'm having a really hard time finding a sata controller card that will support 8 drives and raid 5. I just can't stomach the thought of paying 1000 or more for a pre-built, plus more on drives. Trying to do this as cheap as possible, and slowly buy everything except the drives on eBay when really good deals pop up. Anyways, for what it's worth I've already spent hours trying to find this. I assume it might be easier to search for by someone who really knows there raid controller hardware lol. If anyone can point me in the right direction I'd really appreciate it.

[flibberdipper]

Allegedly the LSI 9260-8i supports RAID 5 with no fuckery involved. Looks like a common price on eBay ranges from $30-35 USD, and some good 'ol CableMatters SAS-8087 breakout cables will run you somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 each.

[Electronics Wizardy]

What os are you doing? Many NAS setups are built around software raid, so you want a HBA, not a raid card. You can also just use the onboard connectors if the board has enough of them.

[Rysters Tech]

There is no good reason to use hardware raid. Modern software can do software raid fast enough on CPU without any special controller requirements that HW raid doesnt make any sense for a NAS.

If you are looking for a good starting platform for a NAS, you can find old SuperMicro X9SCM/X9SCL LGA1155 M-ATX boards out there on ebay for dirt cheap. These usually have 6 sata ports, accept up to either a 2nd/3rd gen i3 or a V1/V2 Xeon E3 chip (not i5's or i7's). They are much more power efficent than the beefier LGA2011 systems of the time, but plenty fast for NAS and despite using a consumer socket, some do have IPMI (although not all boards have this). Only think to keep in mind is that these require Unbuffered ECC UDIMM DDR3 modules to work, I'm using A-Tech modules that specifically called out my particular board The supply on these boards seems to have dried up at the moment but wait for them to show up on ebay, as when the getting is good, you can get the board, a quad core Xeon and a cooler all in for less than $50 plus another 20 dollars in 8gb of ram. 

[Owsleygarcia95]

18 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What os are you doing? Many NAS setups are built around software raid, so you want a HBA, not a raid card. You can also just use the onboard connectors if the board has enough of them.

So I'm not really sure what I'm doing yet. I'm in no hurry and will definitely research and explore my options thoroughly before spending any money. I know my normal pc hardware fairly well but everything nas and raid is new to me. 

 

Anyways, I'm looking into both nas and das, because I have the only PC in my house and I can't see myself caring about attaching this to a network anytime in the next 10 years at least. I plan on buying 8 drives in the 16-20 tb range, and I'll probably wait until a crazy good deal pops up. At the end of the day all I really care about is having a raid 5 so if I lose 1 drive I can rebuild it, and being able to access the files on my computer only. 

 

So my 3 options as far as I can tell are...

 

Building my own nas using cheap used ebay parts. 

 

Buying this qnap below or some other type of JBOD or DAs. Problem is I just watched 4 YouTube videos about it, and in the last one the guy sure made it sound like since this is software only raid support, you need to connect it to another nas with some type of raid controller to support any type of raid configurations. So i would assume that means I can only use the discs individually if i just plug it into a usb port on my pc. Does that sound right or am I misunderstanding things?

 

My third thought was to just throw in a raid controller card into my current pc. Buy a huge case with 8 or 12 bays( I really don't like the options that much, but I'm sure I could find something I could live with. This could possibly mean a new mother board as I only have a 4x1 and a 3x4 ( it's x16 in size but only has 4 lanes) other than my graphics card slot. Still seems like it might be the cheapest (especially taking into account selling current case and/or MB)  and easiest option.

 

So I'm not sure at all which software to use, as I haven't gotten that far. I basically don't know anything about it other than the names of the common ones from watching some YouTube videos. 

 

Could you please explain what a software raid is briefly? I think I kind of figured it out just now googling lol. So basically I wouldn't even need a raid card. Just a decent sata card that'll give 1GB/s across the 8 drives should be more than 8 hds will use in a raid 5 array from what I've seen. Is it possible to just do that and run it on my current pc in windows 11 without it being crap lol? Sorry this got so long, I appreciate your time and the quick response.

 

 

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

24 minutes ago, Owsleygarcia95 said:

So I'm not really sure what I'm doing yet. I'm in no hurry and will definitely research and explore my options thoroughly before spending any money. I know my normal pc hardware fairly well but everything nas and raid is new to me. 

 

Anyways, I'm looking into both nas and das, because I have the only PC in my house and I can't see myself caring about attaching this to a network anytime in the next 10 years at least. I plan on buying 8 drives in the 16-20 tb range, and I'll probably wait until a crazy good deal pops up. At the end of the day all I really care about is having a raid 5 so if I lose 1 drive I can rebuild it, and being able to access the files on my computer only. 

 

So my 3 options as far as I can tell are...

 

Building my own nas using cheap used ebay parts. 

 

Buying this qnap below or some other type of JBOD or DAs. Problem is I just watched 4 YouTube videos about it, and in the last one the guy sure made it sound like since this is software only raid support, you need to connect it to another nas with some type of raid controller to support any type of raid configurations. So i would assume that means I can only use the discs individually if i just plug it into a usb port on my pc. Does that sound right or am I misunderstanding things?

 

My third thought was to just throw in a raid controller card into my current pc. Buy a huge case with 8 or 12 bays( I really don't like the options that much, but I'm sure I could find something I could live with. This could possibly mean a new mother board as I only have a 4x1 and a 3x4 ( it's x16 in size but only has 4 lanes) other than my graphics card slot. Still seems like it might be the cheapest (especially taking into account selling current case and/or MB)  and easiest option.

 

So I'm not sure at all which software to use, as I haven't gotten that far. I basically don't know anything about it other than the names of the common ones from watching some YouTube videos. 

 

Could you please explain what a software raid is briefly? I think I kind of figured it out just now googling lol. So basically I wouldn't even need a raid card. Just a decent sata card that'll give 1GB/s across the 8 drives should be more than 8 hds will use in a raid 5 array from what I've seen. Is it possible to just do that and run it on my current pc in windows 11 without it being crap lol? Sorry this got so long, I appreciate your time and the quick response.

 

 

 

 

How much storage do you need usable?

 

Software raid would mean the os sees all the drives and does the raid stuff in the os. Hardware raid has a card that sees all the drives, and presents virtual disks to a os to use.

 

Yea you should be able to add a card to your current PC and put the drives in there if you have space.

[Owsleygarcia95]

27 minutes ago, Rysters Tech said:

There is no good reason to use hardware raid. Modern software can do software raid fast enough on CPU without any special controller requirements that HW raid doesnt make any sense for a NAS.

If you are looking for a good starting platform for a NAS, you can find old SuperMicro X9SCM/X9SCL LGA1155 M-ATX boards out there on ebay for dirt cheap. These usually have 6 sata ports, accept up to either a 2nd/3rd gen i3 or a V1/V2 Xeon E3 chip (not i5's or i7's). They are much more power efficent than the beefier LGA2011 systems of the time, but plenty fast for NAS and despite using a consumer socket, some do have IPMI (although not all boards have this). Only think to keep in mind is that these require Unbuffered ECC UDIMM DDR3 modules to work, I'm using A-Tech modules that specifically called out my particular board The supply on these boards seems to have dried up at the moment but wait for them to show up on ebay, as when the getting is good, you can get the board, a quad core Xeon and a cooler all in for less than $50 plus another 20 dollars in 8gb of ram. 

Thanks. I honestly just learned about the software raid capabilities these days less than an hour ago lol. I just built a PC for the first time in almost 20 years, about 6 months ago. This forum is such a great place to get answers to questions when you aren't exactly sure what to google lol. 

 

I've seen some of the old cheap server stuff on Ebay, and I really like the idea of using something like that to build a cheap nas. I guess that was some kind of consumer board that accepted server chips too? Do you know of any cheap boards that will definitely have 8 sata ports? I don't mind spending a little more than that, but it doesn't seem like you would need much more just to read and write from hard drives. It's just going to be bulk storage. I'm not going to set it up as a media server as I almost never watch movies, just youtube and gaming. 

 

But yeah, if you could just give me some basics on what type of specs I should be looking for I would appreciate it. 

[Owsleygarcia95]

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How much storage do you need usable?

 

Software raid would mean the os sees all the drives and does the raid stuff in the os. Hardware raid has a card that sees all the drives, and presents virtual disks to a os to use.

 

Yea you should be able to add a card to your current PC and put the drives in there if you have space.

Well I just bought 2 of these yesterday and they aren't even here yet. Seagate Exos X20 18TB SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 3.5" Enterprise Hard Drive - ST18000NM003D. They are refurbished but they have a 90 day return window and I think it came out to around 148 each with tax and free shipping. Going to throw them in my current PC until I decide what I want to do. I know Seagate has a reputation for failing drives, but I figure with a raid 5 array, I will probably be fine just replacing one when it fails. It won't be the end of the world if I lost it, it would just suck lol. I did a deep dive into all the HD manufacturers warranty policies, rma testimonials and reliability a few months ago. It seemed like at the end of the day they're all a little risky.

 

So I will probably buy 6 more of those. If I can't find them at a good price, I will buy 8 more of something similar, pry 16-18. Whatever is the cheapest refurbished with some type of decent return policy if they show up dead.  A raid calculator says it will give me 126 TB at 7x read speeds and I can lose 1 drive and recover the data. I'm guessing that would be 110-115 after there formatted etc. I definitely don't need that much usable, but I'll do my best to fill it up lol. A few of the things I want to get will fill about half of it and I don't want upgrade this for a long long time. 

 

So I guess I'm probably going to go the upgrade case and run them off a Sata card route. Cheaper, and probably just as fast or faster than the other options. I assume setting it up on windows is as simple as a google search? Can I use 3rd party software or does it have to be in the OS? If I can, can you recommend some good software ( I miss the windows XP control panel lol).

 

Thanks.

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 minutes ago, Owsleygarcia95 said:

Well I just bought 2 of these yesterday and they aren't even here yet. Seagate Exos X20 18TB SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 3.5" Enterprise Hard Drive - ST18000NM003D. They are refurbished but they have a 90 day return window and I think it came out to around 148 each with tax and free shipping. Going to throw them in my current PC until I decide what I want to do. I know Seagate has a reputation for failing drives, but I figure with a raid 5 array, I will probably be fine just replacing one when it fails. It won't be the end of the world if I lost it, it would just suck lol. I did a deep dive into all the HD manufacturers warranty policies, rma testimonials and reliability a few months ago. It seemed like at the end of the day they're all a little risky.

 

So I will probably buy 6 more of those. If I can't find them at a good price, I will buy 8 more of something similar, pry 16-18. Whatever is the cheapest refurbished with some type of decent return policy if they show up dead.  A raid calculator says it will give me 126 TB at 7x read speeds and I can lose 1 drive and recover the data. I'm guessing that would be 110-115 after there formatted etc. I definitely don't need that much usable, but I'll do my best to fill it up lol. A few of the things I want to get will fill about half of it and I don't want upgrade this for a long long time. 

 

So I guess I'm probably going to go the upgrade case and run them off a Sata card route. Cheaper, and probably just as fast or faster than the other options. I assume setting it up on windows is as simple as a google search? Can I use 3rd party software or does it have to be in the OS? If I can, can you recommend some good software ( I miss the windows XP control panel lol).

 

Thanks.

You should be able to just add the drives, and set them up as raid using storage space in windows. There are some tricks to getting the max speed with parity raid in storage spaces here though. 

 

Otherwise you can get a hardware raid card and set up the raid in there. Something like a 9260-8i would work fine here and is pretty cheap. Just make sure to get a fan for it.

[Owsleygarcia95]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You should be able to just add the drives, and set them up as raid using storage space in windows. There are some tricks to getting the max speed with parity raid in storage spaces here though. 

 

Otherwise you can get a hardware raid card and set up the raid in there. Something like a 9260-8i would work fine here and is pretty cheap. Just make sure to get a fan for it.

So if I go the windows route any idea how much speed I might be losing? Can you explain the tricks or just tell me what to look up? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

33 minutes ago, Owsleygarcia95 said:

So if I go the windows route any idea how much speed I might be losing? Can you explain the tricks or just tell me what to look up? 

The issue with parity on windows is its picky when it comes to getting good speeds. If you go the 8 drive raid 5 your get probably 100mB/s write speeds if your lucky. I'd probably cut number of columns to 5 and raise the cluster size in ntfs and you should get hundreds of mB/s speeds for writes. This will men your usble space will be a bit less as 1/5 of the total is parity instead of 1/8th

[Blue4130]

20 hours ago, Owsleygarcia95 said:

Well I just bought 2 of these yesterday and they aren't even here yet. Seagate Exos X20 18TB SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 3.5" Enterprise Hard Drive - ST18000NM003D. They are refurbished but they have a 90 day return window and I think it came out to around 148 each with tax and free shipping. Going to throw them in my current PC until I decide what I want to do. I know Seagate has a reputation for failing drives, but I figure with a raid 5 array, I will probably be fine just replacing one when it fails. It won't be the end of the world if I lost it, it would just suck lol. I did a deep dive into all the HD manufacturers warranty policies, rma testimonials and reliability a few months ago. It seemed like at the end of the day they're all a little risky.

 

So I will probably buy 6 more of those. If I can't find them at a good price, I will buy 8 more of something similar, pry 16-18. Whatever is the cheapest refurbished with some type of decent return policy if they show up dead.  A raid calculator says it will give me 126 TB at 7x read speeds and I can lose 1 drive and recover the data. I'm guessing that would be 110-115 after there formatted etc. I definitely don't need that much usable, but I'll do my best to fill it up lol. A few of the things I want to get will fill about half of it and I don't want upgrade this for a long long time. 

 

So I guess I'm probably going to go the upgrade case and run them off a Sata card route. Cheaper, and probably just as fast or faster than the other options. I assume setting it up on windows is as simple as a google search? Can I use 3rd party software or does it have to be in the OS? If I can, can you recommend some good software ( I miss the windows XP control panel lol).

 

Thanks.

Doing single parity with drives that size is risky. I'd personally do dual parity (raid 6). The rebuild time on a failed drive is not trivial, if a second drive fails while rebuilding, you loose everything with raid 5.

 

Assuming that the you don't have a backup of the entire nas....

[Owsleygarcia95]

53 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Doing single parity with drives that size is risky. I'd personally do dual parity (raid 6). The rebuild time on a failed drive is not trivial, if a second drive fails while rebuilding, you loose everything with raid 5.

 

Assuming that the you don't have a backup of the entire nas....

Yeah I've been thinking about it. I've heard that the huge drives are way more complex and way more likely to fail. Plus I'm going to use refurbished seagate drives lol. I wasn't even considering this until I bought 2 refurbished exos 20 18 tb the other day for a total of 148 each with 20% off (had to use an app called zip and pay 6 dollars of interest). But even without that they are only 169.99 right now on Newegg. Brings it from a ridiculous purchase to something I can manage going refurbished. Even if 2 or 3 of them fail in 3 years it's still cheaper. If more than that fail I'll probably just say screw it and make it into a smaller raid lol. But you're right, 108TB will be enough lol. 

[Rysters Tech]

On 12/31/2023 at 7:10 PM, Owsleygarcia95 said:

Thanks. I honestly just learned about the software raid capabilities these days less than an hour ago lol. I just built a PC for the first time in almost 20 years, about 6 months ago. This forum is such a great place to get answers to questions when you aren't exactly sure what to google lol. 

 

I've seen some of the old cheap server stuff on Ebay, and I really like the idea of using something like that to build a cheap nas. I guess that was some kind of consumer board that accepted server chips too? Do you know of any cheap boards that will definitely have 8 sata ports? I don't mind spending a little more than that, but it doesn't seem like you would need much more just to read and write from hard drives. It's just going to be bulk storage. I'm not going to set it up as a media server as I almost never watch movies, just youtube and gaming. 

 

But yeah, if you could just give me some basics on what type of specs I should be looking for I would appreciate it. 

These supermicro boards were never meant for consumers, it is a server board first and foremost, but it was designed for the lower-end Xeon E3's (which performed similarly to the consumer i7's at the time, but had ECC capabilities) that used the same socket as the core series chips, but these usually didnt work in consumer boards. Likewise these cannot run any core cpu's i5 or higher, they strictly only support pentium, celeron, core i3 and Xeon E3 chips. 

 

These consumer-socket serveer boards are great because they typically fit in a standard tower case and can use ATX power supplies. 

 

Very few of these board types have 8 onboard sata ports. If you need anymore than whats on the board it makes alot more sense to just get an HBA that uses a pcie slot to add an additional sata controller and more connections.

 

I would stay away from USB storage solutions as they can be quite buggy and its a mess compared to having everything in a case. By the time you get a USB HDD enclosure setup that can do 8 with its own raid function, you can get a regular computer case that can hold just as many plus an HBA to connect all of them.

 

Good cases that have many hard drive bays include the Fractal Define 7 (not the compact, nano or lite) which can hold 6 3.5 drives out of the box, or 18 with additional brackets. If you want to save a bit of money, a define R5 can hold 8 drives out of the box for alot cheaper (but theres only so many of those left in stock)  The Define 7's silence focused design is more useful if you are running high performance hard drives that are noisy or you have issues with coil whine (with a good quality psu and no GPU that shouldnt be a big issue, especially if you turn on spread spectrum) or if you need 5.25 bays for whatever reason whereas the meshify has less sound dampening foam and more mesh, which leads to more noise from hard drives but less fan noise than the define for the same airflow. The similar Meshify 2 can also hold 18 drives but has a different front panel design that lends itself more towards a gaming rig where all the noise is from fans than a NAS where you will have HDD noise.

 

You dont have to buy a new case though, if you already have an old case that can hold loads of hard drives (many cases from the 2000's and 2010's did) it can totally do the job.

 

If you dont already have a suitable power supply (anything high quality with good efficency) Go for either the Corsair CX-M or RMX, the latter has a zero RPM mode and a 10 year warranty but both are very quiet and well made, but you might need SATA splitters or molex to sata adapters to power all of your drives. 

 

Just check compatibility on CPU with the motherboard you have (if you are buying them seperately) and get ECC Unbuffered UDIMM DDR3 and you are set, any LGA115X cooler will work on these, including the stock cooler, but the CPU socket on these is in a unusual place so make sure your cooler can clear the case. ThermalRight has many great options in the $20 range that work really well for the price.

[Rysters Tech]

23 hours ago, Owsleygarcia95 said:

So if I go the windows route any idea how much speed I might be losing? Can you explain the tricks or just tell me what to look up? 

Running windows on any server is a terrible idea. OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS is miles better and is easier in the longrun as it will stay working. TrueNAS has better support for running ZFS RAID but it can be more complicated to setup.  OpenMediaVault can be used for RAID using various filesystems but ZFS support is buggy.

[Owsleygarcia95]

Appreciate the long response. I ended up buying this already. I just built my system about 6 months ago and I hadn't done it since I was a teenager almost 20 years ago. I didn't realize that most raid is just handled through software now lol. I'm just going to buy an 8 port sata card and set up a raid in windows. There's no other PC's in my house so there's not much point to a nas when all I want in the end is one system to access the raid. 

 

 

 

Can fit up to 12 drives in this, plus 3 sata. Have to wait till February till the stackable drive bays are back in stock but oh well. 

 

I bought 15 120mm fans for 4 dollars each, but they're thermalright with fluid dynamic bearings so I think they'll be good and it's amazon so I can return any if they're bad.

 

Finally figured out the the argb and fan controller situation. Only thing left is how to configure the intake/exhaust the most efficiently. I'm just going to use 4 fan hubs ( that's how many I have on my MB) so I can have maximum control. Everything has dust filters except the back. Any ideas?

 

 

 

 

[Rysters Tech]

Just now, Owsleygarcia95 said:

Appreciate the long response. I ended up buying this already. I just built my system about 6 months ago and I hadn't done it since I was a teenager almost 20 years ago. I didn't realize that most raid is just handled through software now lol. I'm just going to buy an 8 port sata card and set up a raid in windows. There's no other PC's in my house so there's not much point to a nas when all I want in the end is one system to access the raid. 

 

 

 

Can fit up to 12 drives in this, plus 3 sata. Have to wait till February till the stackable drive bays are back in stock but oh well. 

 

I bought 15 120mm fans for 4 dollars each, but they're thermalright with fluid dynamic bearings so I think they'll be good and it's amazon so I can return any if they're bad.

 

Finally figured out the the argb and fan controller situation. Only thing left is how to configure the intake/exhaust the most efficiently. I'm just going to use 4 fan hubs ( that's how many I have on my MB) so I can have maximum control. Everything has dust filters except the back. Any ideas?

 

 

 

 

Just put 4 of them in the front as intakes, and one as exhaust in the rear, that will be plenty, you can keep the others as spares.

 

Software RAID on windows is kind of garbage. You are much better off using a proper NAS OS like TrueNAS, OMV or unraid and using the storage over the network. You will thank me later.

[Owsleygarcia95]

5 minutes ago, Rysters Tech said:

Just put 4 of them in the front as intakes, and one as exhaust in the rear, that will be plenty, you can keep the others as spares.

 

Software RAID on windows is kind of garbage. You are much better off using a proper NAS OS like TrueNAS, OMV or unraid and using the storage over the network. You will thank me later.

Well the good thing is that case supports an extra ITX board ( you have to buy a 250 or 400 dollar power supply from them because thats all there is room for). I'm going to see how this works for now. But if I run into major issues I can always throw an ITX board in this case and use that as my NAS. I just can't afford it right away. In a couple months I'm sure I could swing it. But I kind of want to see if this works for now. Someone convinced me to just do a raid 6. Hopefully windows can write the redundancy properly lol. 

[Owsleygarcia95]

21 hours ago, Rysters Tech said:

Just put 4 of them in the front as intakes, and one as exhaust in the rear, that will be plenty, you can keep the others as spares.

 

Software RAID on windows is kind of garbage. You are much better off using a proper NAS OS like TrueNAS, OMV or unraid and using the storage over the network. You will thank me later.

So after thinking about it some more last night and trying to research raid in windows ( there's very little info on it), I've decided to take your advice and just build a proper nas. I'm probably going to make another thread about it later, but you seem very knowledgeable so I figured I'd ask your opinion to see if I'm on the right track. First off, I don't think it's in this thread, but I ordered a huge phantek case a couple days ago already. Luckily the cheapest nice thing I could find with 12 drive bays also supports a 2nd itx system. 160 after rebate, but if you add the itx it doesn't support 2 power supplies. Of course they'll sell you a 1200 watt titanium dual system for 250 lol (at least I'll be able to turn off the nas and safely run path tracing on a 5090 lol). 

 

 

So since cheap has gone out the window already I'm trying not to go overboard. Realistically its going to take me a month or so to buy all this without dipping into savings. I want to slow down and make sure I don't have to a bunch or returns lol. I'm pretty sure I can get a decent amount on marketplace for my current case and power supply if I don't rush it. Anyways, I think an ssd cache is kind of pointless for my use case. None of the transfers need to be that fast. I did just find out that the cheapest am4 motherboard supports splitting into 8x8 bifurcation. I was originally thinking the only way to get 10 gig networking and 8 sata ports was an m.2 adapter. As far as I can tell there's literally one with 8 ports. It's on Ali express for 45 with cables or amazon for 80 with no cables. Splits off from 2 mini sas. 4 reviews on Amazon and one person said it broke in 2 days lol. 

 

Anyways. It's either get that and throw a 10gig card in the 3x16 slot, or deal with pcie bifurcation. A quick Google search shows that am4 risers sucked with there own 6000 series graphics cards, but maybe that has nothing to do with bifurcation perform. I feel like if I go that route I should definitely make sure I have my power supply in hand and buy the cpu/mb/ram off Amazon so I can return it if I have to. 

 

So I'm thinking this board.

 

 

 

 

Gen4 seems pointless. Itx boards with 10gig basically don't exist so thats not an option. Would just getting a 4x sata controller for an m.2 slot ( those are cheap and there are actually multiple options) and using the 4 on the board actually be better since I'm probably using 2 sets of lanes to the cpu? It's either that or a riser card. Actually shit. I guess I need that m.2 slot for an operating system  lmao. Riser it is then. I don't know how I forgot about that this entire 3 hours I've spent trying to figure this out.

 

Anyways do you think this cpu and a fast 16gb ddr4 kit will handle 8 drives? I should be able to keep it just under 400 with cpu/mb/ram/nic/sata. 

 

 

 

[Blue4130]

30 minutes ago, Owsleygarcia95 said:

So after thinking about it some more last night and trying to research raid in windows ( there's very little info on it), I've decided to take your advice and just build a proper nas. I'm probably going to make another thread about it later, but you seem very knowledgeable so I figured I'd ask your opinion to see if I'm on the right track. First off, I don't think it's in this thread, but I ordered a huge phantek case a couple days ago already. Luckily the cheapest nice thing I could find with 12 drive bays also supports a 2nd itx system. 160 after rebate, but if you add the itx it doesn't support 2 power supplies. Of course they'll sell you a 1200 watt titanium dual system for 250 lol (at least I'll be able to turn off the nas and safely run path tracing on a 5090 lol). 

 

 

 

So since cheap has gone out the window already I'm trying not to go overboard. Realistically its going to take me a month or so to buy all this without dipping into savings. I want to slow down and make sure I don't have to a bunch or returns lol. I'm pretty sure I can get a decent amount on marketplace for my current case and power supply if I don't rush it. Anyways, I think an ssd cache is kind of pointless for my use case. None of the transfers need to be that fast. I did just find out that the cheapest am4 motherboard supports splitting into 8x8 bifurcation. I was originally thinking the only way to get 10 gig networking and 8 sata ports was an m.2 adapter. As far as I can tell there's literally one with 8 ports. It's on Ali express for 45 with cables or amazon for 80 with no cables. Splits off from 2 mini sas. 4 reviews on Amazon and one person said it broke in 2 days lol. 

 

Anyways. It's either get that and throw a 10gig card in the 3x16 slot, or deal with pcie bifurcation. A quick Google search shows that am4 risers sucked with there own 6000 series graphics cards, but maybe that has nothing to do with bifurcation perform. I feel like if I go that route I should definitely make sure I have my power supply in hand and buy the cpu/mb/ram off Amazon so I can return it if I have to. 

 

So I'm thinking this board.

 

 

 

 

 

Gen4 seems pointless. Itx boards with 10gig basically don't exist so thats not an option. Would just getting a 4x sata controller for an m.2 slot ( those are cheap and there are actually multiple options) and using the 4 on the board actually be better since I'm probably using 2 sets of lanes to the cpu? It's either that or a riser card. Actually shit. I guess I need that m.2 slot for an operating system  lmao. Riser it is then. I don't know how I forgot about that this entire 3 hours I've spent trying to figure this out.

 

Anyways do you think this cpu and a fast 16gb ddr4 kit will handle 8 drives? I should be able to keep it just under 400 with cpu/mb/ram/nic/sata. 

 

 

 

 

 

Is there a reason why you want two systems in one box? Costs and ease of build would go way down if you separated the builds. Options would open way up on what hardware you could use.

[Owsleygarcia95]

6 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Is there a reason why you want two systems in one box? Costs and ease of build would go way down if you separated the builds. Options would open way up on what hardware you could use.

Well I already bought the case before I even planned on doing this. I think the power supply upgrade will only cost about 125ish after I sell my current one. Plus I like the idea of having 1200 watts for a potential 5090 6090 if they're not 2500 bucks lol.  And the rest of the build is only gonna be about 400. Alot cheaper than an 8 bay pre-built nas lol. Any new nas style 8 bay case I've seen costs more than the huge 2 system case I bought. I don't know, I can't think of a good enough reason to return the case. It will probably cost a little more at the end but I'll end up with a 1200 watt titanium power supply that I can throw at one system if I ever want to( I'm assuming it works that way I've been googling stuff for 3 or 4 days and haven't got to that yet lol). I'm sure it'll be a bit of a mess in the back but I'm not to worried about that as long as I know where it all is lol.

[Owsleygarcia95]

19 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Is there a reason why you want two systems in one box? Costs and ease of build would go way down if you separated the builds. Options would open way up on what hardware you could use.

Fuck it doesn't come with cables lol. The starter kit is 80 and the complete kit is 180. I might just put a power supply on my desk lol.

[Blue4130]

3 minutes ago, Owsleygarcia95 said:

Well I already bought the case before I even planned on doing this. I think the power supply upgrade will only cost about 125ish after I sell my current one. Plus I like the idea of having 1200 watts for a potential 5090 6090 if they're not 2500 bucks lol.  And the rest of the build is only gonna be about 400. Alot cheaper than an 8 bay pre-built nas lol. Any new nas style 8 bay case I've seen costs more than the huge 2 system case I bought. I don't know, I can't think of a good enough reason to return the case. It will probably cost a little more at the end but I'll end up with a 1200 watt titanium power supply that I can throw at one system if I ever want to( I'm assuming it works that way I've been googling stuff for 3 or 4 days and haven't got to that yet lol). I'm sure it'll be a bit of a mess in the back but I'm not to worried about that as long as I know where it all is lol.

Keep this case for your main system. But for the love of god, don't try to build a nas in this as well. It will just lead to overly complex systems with many compromises rather than properly well thought out machines.

 

This case was never intended for a nas. It was made as a streaming box.

 

If i was going to make a nas, I'd be looking at a board like this...

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X570D4U-2L2T/BCM#Specifications

 

ECC supoort, multiple m.2, dual 10gbe ports, 8 sata onboard, ipmi...

[Owsleygarcia95]

12 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Keep this case for your main system. But for the love of god, don't try to build a nas in this as well. It will just lead to overly complex systems with many compromises rather than properly well thought out machines.

 

This case was never intended for a nas. It was made as a streaming box.

 

If i was going to make a nas, I'd be looking at a board like this...

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X570D4U-2L2T/BCM#Specifications

 

ECC supoort, multiple m.2, dual 10gbe ports, 8 sata onboard, ipmi...

That does look nice. But the board alone is 300. Seems like that would end up being alot more at the end. I really don't think I'll need to upgrade the nas for a very long time. And if I ever decide to I'll have an itx build I could do something with. Is it just that you hate it personally or is it really a bad idea? Won't it get the job done at the end of the day? 

[Blue4130]

1 minute ago, Owsleygarcia95 said:

That does look nice. But the board alone is 300. Seems like that would end up being alot more at the end. I really don't think I'll need to upgrade the nas for a very long time. And if I ever decide to I'll have an itx build I could do something with. Is it just that you hate it personally or is it really a bad idea? Won't it get the job done at the end of the day? 

Its just really a less than ideal setup cramming two systems into one box and sharing the psu. There is a reason that it was only done by one or two companies for a single generation. Notice how nobody is doing it anymore.

 

There are other boards than the one I linked to, that was just one that I personally like. Head over to serve the home. They have plenty of nas focused builds in the forums. Many using cheaper Chinese boards that have various nas focused features.