Computer help requested - large bucket building

[ANTIcarrot]

In computer terms, a 'bucket' is a large RAID array, usually several times larger than the biggest disc available, used in things like video editing and animation. I'm trying to build a 4TB+ bucket as a general storage area for my computer. I already have the discs, but my motherboard isn't up to the task of supporting more than a 2TB raid arrray because of a 48bit Large Block Aaddressing restriction. Which is kinda an odfd thing to find on a board that advertised itself as offering all the benifits of 64-bit technology...

Apparently what I need is a dedicated RAID or SAS card, capable of LBA-64, operating at least 5 discs, and which will fit in a PCI or PCIe x1 slot. (And which preferably costs less than $500.) Else I'll need a new motherboard to go with it...

Anyone any suggestions?

[Spec8472]

In computer terms, a 'bucket' is a large RAID array, usually several times larger than the biggest disc available, used in things like video editing and animation. I'm trying to build a 4TB+ bucket as a general storage area for my computer. I already have the discs, but my motherboard isn't up to the task of supporting more than a 2TB raid arrray because of a 48bit Large Block Aaddressing restriction. Which is kinda an odfd thing to find on a board that advertised itself as offering all the benifits of 64-bit technology...

Apparently what I need is a dedicated RAID or SAS card, capable of LBA-64, operating at least 5 discs, and which will fit in a PCI or PCIe x1 slot. (And which preferably costs less than $500.) Else I'll need a new motherboard to go with it...

Anyone any suggestions?

- A bucket is anything you define it to be, not specific to RAID. The term you're looking for is 'volume' or 'logical disk'

- RAID Arrays are usually multiples of the *smallest* volume

- Getting a motherboard that can run a 64bit CPU doesn't imply anything about the feature set of a RAID controller on the same board.

- RAID controllers built onto conumer-level motherboards suck performance and features wise. Always have, and likely always will. They're mainly there because it cost another few dollars to add, and looks good on a feature list.

- RAID controllers built onto consumer-level motherboards are generally only good for very basic use -- if you want anything approaching decent performance, go for a dedicated RAID controller.

- RAID controllers built onto the motherboard can't be swapped out if they go bad. If you do swap out for a new motherboard, 99% chance your entire RAID array is gone. You'd better have backups.

- A SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) RAID card won't talk to your SATA (Serial ATA) drives. You'll need a SATA RAID controller, or SAS drives. They're two different technologies - and they don't talk.

Depending upon what your actual intention is with the array, you have several options:

1) Use a Software RAID option. Performance isn't usually that bad. It'll be faster than the onboard controller anyway. (Cheapest. Read/Write speeds varies.)
2) Use an external enclosure (eg Drobo) which provides access to your disk as one giant volume and has an eSATA port. (Not too expensive, read/write speeds somewhere between 1 drive and a proper RAID card)
3) Get a nicer RAID controller. (Expensive, read/write speeds correlate directly to how much you're spending on the card)
4) Plonk all your drives on another system, install Windows Home Server on it, and then access your data over Ethernet. (Not too expensive, read/write speeds == 1 drive, minus ethernet lag.)


If you're actually going to be doing video editing, or anything IO intensive, then you need a proper external enclosure, or a nice RAID card.

If it's just somewhere to store data for a media centre or something, then IO isn't too important, and 1/2/4 will work.

'course, if you do decide to go down the SAS route, then I can highly recommend the Dell MD3000's.
We have one of those filled with 15K RPM SAS drives, running a RAID10 array. Random IO performance is absolutely amazing. 'course, it's pushing data to two VM servers, each running about 20 VMs.

[Shadowhawk]

Anyone any suggestions?

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