Contained 10 bay RAID/anything

[Cramig88]

Budget (including currency): irrelevant, depends more on the parts. 4tb SSDs, or 4tb HDDs, or a combo?

 

Country: United States

 

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Cold storage, archives, immediate access if needed.  Expandable later, but for now, redundancy and speed.

 

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc.  

kinda irrelevant, it’s cold storage. So old movies, backups of trash, whatever.  Read on…

 

so I got a 10 bay 3.5/2.5 sata raid enclosure. Supports all the goodies, even using individual drives (any bays occupied).

hence the planning part. Assuming ya read the above, cost isn’t really a question, it’s more configuration for long term storage, redundancy and quick access read/write. Sure OK it’ll be usb 3.1 but I’m well aware lol

 

as of now we got the bay and 2x 4tb seagate HDDs. Got em off amazon for 75 plus tax. Not bad huh?

so how should I set the rest up?

HDD/SDD/HDD/SDD and so on?

HDD (5 top bays) SDD (5-10)?

Or HDD straight through, cause heck if one dies, 75 ain’t a loss. BUT if an SDD dies, those are expensive and shouldn’t. I’d prefer the SSDs to be “caches” if that makes sense?  Quick IOPs. 
or should I return the 2 HDDs and go all SDD but smaller since their bleeping expensive?

 

id go HDD straight through for cost. If it dies, 75 to replace, ain’t hurting me. Performance?  There’s 10 drives, I think I’m a lunatic for thinking half HDD and half SSD is gonna help anything over 3.1 lol!

 

any advice?  Thanks!  And yes it will be a shared network drive/folder in my LAN. Not that it matters cause we’re still topping out 3.1. I mean, even if it’s got 2x HDDs in there on 0 compared to just a SSD to 3.1 - speed will be the same (should?)

regardless we’re talking up to ten bays across 3.1. Insane yes, but it’s an archive. Ever lost kids baby pictures?  Yeah that’s a good stress factor id like to avoid! (Not from experience, customers I’ve had, it’s crappy…)

 

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, Cramig88 said:

Budget (including currency): irrelevant, depends more on the parts. 4tb SSDs, or 4tb HDDs, or a combo?

 

Country: United States

 

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Cold storage, archives, immediate access if needed.  Expandable later, but for now, redundancy and speed.

 

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc.  

kinda irrelevant, it’s cold storage. So old movies, backups of trash, whatever.  Read on…

 

so I got a 10 bay 3.5/2.5 sata raid enclosure. Supports all the goodies, even using individual drives (any bays occupied).

hence the planning part. Assuming ya read the above, cost isn’t really a question, it’s more configuration for long term storage, redundancy and quick access read/write. Sure OK it’ll be usb 3.1 but I’m well aware lol

 

as of now we got the bay and 2x 4tb seagate HDDs. Got em off amazon for 75 plus tax. Not bad huh?

so how should I set the rest up?

HDD/SDD/HDD/SDD and so on?

HDD (5 top bays) SDD (5-10)?

Or HDD straight through, cause heck if one dies, 75 ain’t a loss. BUT if an SDD dies, those are expensive and shouldn’t. I’d prefer the SSDs to be “caches” if that makes sense?  Quick IOPs. 
or should I return the 2 HDDs and go all SDD but smaller since their bleeping expensive?

 

id go HDD straight through for cost. If it dies, 75 to replace, ain’t hurting me. Performance?  There’s 10 drives, I think I’m a lunatic for thinking half HDD and half SSD is gonna help anything over 3.1 lol!

 

any advice?  Thanks!  And yes it will be a shared network drive/folder in my LAN. Not that it matters cause we’re still topping out 3.1. I mean, even if it’s got 2x HDDs in there on 0 compared to just a SSD to 3.1 - speed will be the same (should?)

regardless we’re talking up to ten bays across 3.1. Insane yes, but it’s an archive. Ever lost kids baby pictures?  Yeah that’s a good stress factor id like to avoid! (Not from experience, customers I’ve had, it’s crappy…)

 

You don't mention how much space you need. What are your actual needs?

[Cramig88]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

You don't mention how much space you need. What are your actual needs?

Good call

14tb single drive HDD I think is failing, gotta back that up ASAP. 12.2 usable, not sure how much is free but chkdisk is going now, has been for like 2 days

[Cramig88]

Good point to bring up, my apologies everyone

 

14tb is nearly full and it’s a single drive WD something. Lots of archives on that and yeah, needs offloading as soon as possible

 

dude huge high five. Didn’t even think about it

[Blue4130]

34 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

Good point to bring up, my apologies everyone

 

14tb is nearly full and it’s a single drive WD something. Lots of archives on that and yeah, needs offloading as soon as possible

 

dude huge high five. Didn’t even think about it

If it was me, I would not get ten hard drives. I would get two. Two big drives, clones of each other and rotate them out. Skip the raid over USB. 

[mariushm]

Store your data on both drives for a few months. 

Premature failure is a thing ... a higher percentage of drives develop failures within the first few months of operating 24/7 

 

Also at 75$ I suspect those Seagate drives are not NAS grade (or server grade) and they're probably SMR drives with only 2 years warranty or something like that.  I don't buy Seagate at all, my latest purchases were WD Red Plus (CMR drives).

 

I don't know what enclosure you got... it's possible the enclosure uses sata port multipliers  - multipliers convert 1 sata port to 5 sata ports  - maybe your enclosure has a 2 port sata controller and  2  1 to 5 sata multipliers - if this is the case, 5 drives will share the bandwidth of a single sata port so there's little sense thinking of SSDs to speed up transfers or whatever.

[Cramig88]

12 hours ago, mariushm said:

Store your data on both drives for a few months. 

Premature failure is a thing ... a higher percentage of drives develop failures within the first few months of operating 24/7 

 

Also at 75$ I suspect those Seagate drives are not NAS grade (or server grade) and they're probably SMR drives with only 2 years warranty or something like that.  I don't buy Seagate at all, my latest purchases were WD Red Plus (CMR drives).

 

I don't know what enclosure you got... it's possible the enclosure uses sata port multipliers  - multipliers convert 1 sata port to 5 sata ports  - maybe your enclosure has a 2 port sata controller and  2  1 to 5 sata multipliers - if this is the case, 5 drives will share the bandwidth of a single sata port so there's little sense thinking of SSDs to speed up transfers or whatever.

The raid enclosure is this

CENMATE 10 Bay Hard Drive RAID... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCZ152X5?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

 

the seagates are this(these? lol)

Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 |... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ND64CQ1?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
 

and yes I am aware the drives are refurbished. No they aren’t NAS, I have those in my server. I wish, cause my server is down and I could just bop the drives in there - I know what raid X it is so it would work (presumably?)

 

both of ya make a good point. Possibly just start with the two, cause yeah, they ARE bound for failure from the get go - they’re refurbs. Chances are high one or both are gonna fail within the first year, if not, it’s inevitable.

 

 That’s why I’m wondering if I should bother getting SSDs, ugh, way more money, but they’re reliable. HDDs, cheap, but reliability is.. a toss of the dice

 

Far as “I prefer this or that”, that’s fine. I go there, WD all the way. Go here, Seagate all day.  From my own experience, and I got a CLOSET full of HDDs and small SSDs from its infancy. Even SDHDDs…? Yeah, they just had larger caches, the hybrid ones. 
Assuming I have 40 drives (prob more) unused. In terms of drives, everything is seagate. Why?  1:1 ratio, WD has failed on me. Every, single, drive. I might hold off a year or 5 before I get one and sure enough, I dono why but it’s just my experience, somehow my entire life. Isn’t prejudice, it just always happens idk why

seagate on the other hand?  4 failures total. Yeah, four. One hybrid SDHHD, and 3 HDDs. The ssd thing, wasn’t really a surprise, it was best to hell. 2 of those were 3.5 satas on raid, so easy hot swap. One was a super old NAS drive in my server - again hot swap

so yeah, everyone can have their favs, hey go you. If it works don’t fix it right?  Same here, just team green. 
…plus I work in a datacenter, we don’t touch WD. Not sure why but it isn’t the first DC I’ve worked in that only uses seagate for 3.5/2.5. Nvme’s are most always Intel optane related or Samsung. Never anything else

 

i like the 2x drive idea, perhaps I should get 2x more so I have 8g useable across raid 10?

 

oh and the manual, try and find it. That will show you how the drives work. 1-5 and 6-10 are seperate, somehow it breaks it down from there into its raid modes. The manual shows a diagram

[Blue4130]

17 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

 

i like the 2x drive idea, perhaps I should get 2x more so I have 8g useable across raid 10?

 

oh and the manual, try and find it. That will show you how the drives work. 1-5 and 6-10 are seperate, somehow it breaks it down from there into its raid modes. The manual shows a diagram

Do you mean 8tb? That is all of the space that you need? If so, I would absolutely NOT use something like this. Single drives are the way to go. 

[mariushm]

This 10 bay enclosure equips with JMS567+JMB391+JMB393 chip and USB 3.0 output interface, Max 5Gbps under UASP control. 

 

JMS576 USB 3.1 Gen1 to SATA 6Gb/s Bridge Controller : https://www.jmicron.com/file/download/1023/JMS576_Product+Brief.pdf

 

JMB391 : SATA 3Gb/s RAID Port Multiplier : https://www.jmicron.com/file/download/994/JMB391.pdf

 

JMB391 is a single chip, 1 to 5-ports SATA 3Gb/s Port Multiplier with RAID function supported. It is
designed to provide SATA port expansion, data protection and performance aggregation at various
applications.

 

JMB393 : 1 to 5-ports Serial ATA II Port Multiplier with RAID function support : https://www.jmicron.com/file/download/910/JMB393.pdf

 

JMicron JMB393 is a single chip, 1 to 5-ports Serial ATA II Port Multiplier with RAID function support.
It is designed to provide SATA port expansion, data protection and performance aggregation at various
applications.

 

So it's a 5gbps usb to a single sata 6 gbps (550 MB/s) port,  which goes into a 1 to 5 sata 3 gbps (300 MB/s each) chip, and I guess only two of the 5 ports are used, each of the two sata 3 gbps has a jmb393 attached to it ... 5 drives share a 300 MB/s connection. 

 

Hate this kind of stuff... lots of points where things can crap out. 

 

If you don't mind sata 2 speeds (ex 300 MB/s) and you want hardware raid, there's areca hardware raid cards super cheap, for example $53 for a 24 port Areca 1280ML : https://www.ebay.com/itm/326713887474

Each of the 6 connectors can take in a cable that separates into 4 SATA connectors, so you'd have in total up to 24 drives, each with max 300 MB/s ... .and it uses 3 Marvell proper sata controllers each capable of doing 8 sata ports 

 

Otherwise, there's cheap LSI controller cards, that can do 8-16 sata 6gbps  for even 20-30$