Upgrade my NAS/HTPC with SAS, does it worth it?

[mizifih]

The hardware:

• Case: Corsair Carbide Air 240
• ASUS Z87M-PLUS
• Intel i5 4460 (stock clock and cooler)
• Kingston HyperX Blu HS 8GB (4x2) DDR3-1333MHz
• 3x WD Red 3 TB NAS
• Old IMATION SSD for OS (Currently Windows 10. Yes, I know...)
• SYBA SD-PEX40054 PCI-Express 2.0
• 2x NIC to serve two separate LANs (routers)

Will I get better speeds write speeds and, most important, make it more reliable if I use the LSI SAS 9211-8i 6Gbps 8 Port PCI Express Linus mentioned on his Build a NAS video?

 

I'm already using the SYBA Card, in RAID 0 (no redundancy, moar speeds). Most of the data I can lose, important files like family photos and videos and some documents, more sensitive stuff that I can't afford to lose are also upload to the cloud, currently Drive and Dropbox, so if things go south, I'll just have to download some TV Shows it again.

 

I'll jump to unRAID, that I already decided, I even bought a new graphics card so I can virtualize windows for the HTPC part. I'll also virtualize a Linux for the download part (Sonarr, rutorrent, CouchPotato, all that good stuff), unlike windows, not using dedicated hardware, just a plain old virtual machine.

 

Anyways, I blabbed too much.

 

Thank you guys for taking the time. If I forgot anything, please, let me know, let me help you help me

[Aekim]

Not really, SATA has 600mb/s and every HDD is slower. Only if you go SSD only^^

Mostly it's for more ports, so if you need more get it. You can set your SSD as cache and perhaps link the  nics, that would improve it for sure

 

[sybreeder]

With 2 2Tb Drives in Raid 0 i got around 350MB/s so with 3 drives you'd get around ~400-450MB/s at most. 

 

[mizifih]

9 hours ago, Aekim said:

You can set your SSD as cache and perhaps link the  nics, that would improve it for sure

 

Hum... Link the nicks to a SSD? That's new for me.

Is one SSD more then enough? I'm upgrading the OS to unRaid, I know I can use SSDs for cache, I didn't know about this NIC linking part. So, what if I add two SSDs? I have one laying around, just one for system cache and that NIC link would sufice? I honestly don't think that I need to improve my LANs speeds, like, one is serving a WDTV that's connected via WiFi, and I'm using an old 100mbit USB adapter to connect the server to it's router. The other NIC is a 1gbit and it's connected to server other wired devices, and it's not common having more then two accessing it through that 1gbit port.

 

Thank you, @Aekim.

 

9 hours ago, sybreeder said:

With 2 2Tb Drives in Raid 0 i got around 350MB/s so with 3 drives you'd get around ~400-450MB/s at most. 

 

Ok, you mentioned a lot of speeds, but I don't know what my limit is and where it is. Taking what you said, I think my HDDs are the slower part, but how slow? It's not that I don't want to add more, it's just that I don't need it, yet. My video library grows weekly with TV Shows and movies being added. @Aekim just said it's 600MB/s, so I'm getting close? I'll use at least one SSD, for cache, that doesn't mean anything in terms of performance, right?

 

Thank you, @sybreeder.

[Aekim]

You get about 100-120mb/s with Gigabit LAN, so if you link 2 gbit lan you get 200mb/s perhaps (but both Server and PC). You can get old cheap Intel dual or quad port Gbit LAN cards on eBay.

Otherwise you can get 10gbit but thats really expensive. So your LAN is nearly everytime your bottleneck. 

 

A HDD in general has about 100-150mb/s max. But I don't know how fast unraid gets with a few drives. (New) SSDs have about 500mb/s or more so you satisfy your SATA connection and you max out your Gbit LAN.