Affordable Raid Card with SSD Cache

[Hell Bomb]

Over the last year or so I have been slowing upgrading my computer piece by piece and its about time I started looking into upgrading the storage portion of my PC. I am looking to put in six 3tb 7k RPM HDs with two 256GB SSDs for cache purposes and was wondering if anyone has any good recommendations? I am a pretty heavy gamer and will be most likely setting this up with either RAID 6 or Raid 10 depending on the write performance boost of the SSD cache as the read performance is pretty decent with both.

[Taswell]

Highpoint Rocket raid. some motherboards have onboard raid support too.

[Streetguru]

15 minutes ago, Hell Bomb said:

 

Just build a NAS and use freeNAS so you don't need a RAID card

also you're better off buying 4TB drives over 3TB drives so you can get away with less of them

[Hell Bomb]

1 minute ago, Streetguru said:

Just build a NAS and use freeNAS so you don't need a RAID card

also you're better off buying 4TB drives over 3TB drives so you can get away with less of them

FreeNAS doesn't provide the solution I need.

More interested in the quantitative speed boost provided by the number of drives with the added reliability of the of having a greater number of drive failures.

8 minutes ago, ITheSpazI said:

Highpoint Rocket raid. some motherboards have onboard raid support too.

Most motherboards have onboard raid however, I have not found any that support SSD Cache.

[Streetguru]

2 minutes ago, Hell Bomb said:

FreeNAS doesn't provide the solution I need.

More interested in the quantitative speed boost provided by the number of drives with the added reliability of the of having a greater number of drive failures.

Most motherboards have onboard raid however, I have not found any that support SSD Cache.

Seems to support caching, otherwise a good RAID card is going to be expensive, and you probably don't want your NAS and main PC as the same machine

L2ARC Devices

ZFS allows you to equip your system with dedicated read cache devices. Typically, you’ll want these devices to be lower latency than your main storage pool. Remember that the primary read cache used by the system is system RAM, which is orders of magnitude faster than any SSD. If you can satisfy your read cache requirements with RAM, you’ll enjoy better performance than if you use SSD read cache. In addition, there is a scenario where an L2ARC read cache can actually drop performance. Consider a system with 6GB of memory cache (ARC) and a working set that is 5.9 GB. This system might enjoy a read cache hit ratio of nearly 100%. If SSD L2ARC is added to the system, the L2ARC requires space in RAM to map its address space. This space will come at the cost of evicting data from memory and placing it in the L2ARC. The ARC hit rate will drop, and misses will be satisfied from the (far slower) SSD L2ARC. In short, not every system can benefit from an L2ARC. FreeNAS includes tools in the GUI and at the command line that can determine ARC sizing and hit rates. If the ARC size is hitting the maximum allowed by RAM, and if the hit rate is below 90%, the system can benefit from L2ARC. If the ARC is smaller than RAM or if the hit rate is 99.X%, adding L2ARC to the system will not improve performance. As far as selecting appropriate devices for L2ARC, they should be biased towards random read performance. The data on them is not persistent, and ZFS behaves quite well when faced with L2ARC device failure. There is no need or provision to mirror or otherwise make L2ARC devices redundant, nor is there a need for power protection on these devices.

 

http://www.freenas.org/blog/a-complete-guide-to-freenas-hardware-design-part-iii-pools-performance-and-cache/

[Hell Bomb]

4 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Seems to support caching, otherwise a good RAID card is going to be expensive, and you probably don't want your NAS and main PC as the same machine

L2ARC Devices

ZFS allows you to equip your system with dedicated read cache devices. Typically, you’ll want these devices to be lower latency than your main storage pool. Remember that the primary read cache used by the system is system RAM, which is orders of magnitude faster than any SSD. If you can satisfy your read cache requirements with RAM, you’ll enjoy better performance than if you use SSD read cache. In addition, there is a scenario where an L2ARC read cache can actually drop performance. Consider a system with 6GB of memory cache (ARC) and a working set that is 5.9 GB. This system might enjoy a read cache hit ratio of nearly 100%. If SSD L2ARC is added to the system, the L2ARC requires space in RAM to map its address space. This space will come at the cost of evicting data from memory and placing it in the L2ARC. The ARC hit rate will drop, and misses will be satisfied from the (far slower) SSD L2ARC. In short, not every system can benefit from an L2ARC. FreeNAS includes tools in the GUI and at the command line that can determine ARC sizing and hit rates. If the ARC size is hitting the maximum allowed by RAM, and if the hit rate is below 90%, the system can benefit from L2ARC. If the ARC is smaller than RAM or if the hit rate is 99.X%, adding L2ARC to the system will not improve performance. As far as selecting appropriate devices for L2ARC, they should be biased towards random read performance. The data on them is not persistent, and ZFS behaves quite well when faced with L2ARC device failure. There is no need or provision to mirror or otherwise make L2ARC devices redundant, nor is there a need for power protection on these devices.

 

http://www.freenas.org/blog/a-complete-guide-to-freenas-hardware-design-part-iii-pools-performance-and-cache/

While informative, completely irrelevant for me.

 

Yes, RAM is a great read cache and significantly faster than an SSD or SSD boosted array, however, unless using it to create a RAM drive and installing games/applications on there, increasing my installed ram will not improve the performance of my application/game load times, that's not how windows utilizes system RAM.

 

Yes, a NAS would be a great place to store media files, however, that is not my main concern as my original post is most directed towards performance instead of size.

 

Yes, L2ARC does have the ability to improve load times for my exact situation, except im on windows and the only way I could make that work effectively on my setup would be to have it function as a DAS either through another device, or via VM NEITHER of which would be ideal.

[SLAYR]

11 minutes ago, Hell Bomb said:

While informative, completely irrelevant for me.

 

Yes, RAM is a great read cache and significantly faster than an SSD or SSD boosted array, however, unless using it to create a RAM drive and installing games/applications on there, increasing my installed ram will not improve the performance of my application/game load times, that's not how windows utilizes system RAM.

 

Yes, a NAS would be a great place to store media files, however, that is not my main concern as my original post is most directed towards performance instead of size.

If you are doing this to improve load times best option would be to just get an ssd to store the main games/programs you use, and use a raid array for the hdds to improve their speed. 

 

With an ssd cache it really isn't worth it, all you are doing is slowing down the ssd as it will still be held back by how slow hdds are, I have seen a few ssd cache/raid cards, but not with support for 8 total drives.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00Y8LRJUG/ref=mp_s_a_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1476115943&sr=8-8&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=raid+ssd+cache+card&dpPl=1&dpID=41vQPFraJ1L&ref=plSrch

 

Not sure why you even need a redundant raid array for games, maybe just for the save files, if so just setup a windows backup on those files, or use something like the steam cloud and just put the drives in raid 0 after if you just want performance.

[Electronics Wizardy]

30 minutes ago, Hell Bomb said:

While informative, completely irrelevant for me.

 

Yes, RAM is a great read cache and significantly faster than an SSD or SSD boosted array, however, unless using it to create a RAM drive and installing games/applications on there, increasing my installed ram will not improve the performance of my application/game load times, that's not how windows utilizes system RAM.

 

Yes, a NAS would be a great place to store media files, however, that is not my main concern as my original post is most directed towards performance instead of size.

 

Yes, L2ARC does have the ability to improve load times for my exact situation, except im on windows and the only way I could make that work effectively on my setup would be to have it function as a DAS either through another device, or via VM NEITHER of which would be ideal.

Some of the highend lsi cards do this, and id stay away from anything that wan't lsi(or areca). The thing is these cards are 500+ dollars.

 

 

A ssd cache isn't worth it, just have 2 arrays.

[Hell Bomb]

On 10/10/2016 at 0:14 PM, SLAYR said:

If you are doing this to improve load times best option would be to just get an ssd to store the main games/programs you use, and use a raid array for the hdds to improve their speed. 

 

With an ssd cache it really isn't worth it, all you are doing is slowing down the ssd as it will still be held back by how slow hdds are, I have seen a few ssd cache/raid cards, but not with support for 8 total drives.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00Y8LRJUG/ref=mp_s_a_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1476115943&sr=8-8&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=raid+ssd+cache+card&dpPl=1&dpID=41vQPFraJ1L&ref=plSrch

 

Not sure why you even need a redundant raid array for games, maybe just for the save files, if so just setup a windows backup on those files, or use something like the steam cloud and just put the drives in raid 0 after if you just want performance.

Currently running 2 SSDs RAID 0, which is good, but the limited storage space is annoying and doesn't provide any sort of fail safe. Guess I'll continue to do some research and will post whatever I end up going with for someone else who is interested.