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I'm looking to rebuild a NAS box with the room for expandability. I currently have a RAID5 (3x500GB) array with a very generic controller that is slow, to say the least. My main issue is that I've filled it. I'd like to buy 3x500GB drives then build the new array with the new disks as the target. After I transfer all the data from my original I'd like to expand the array using my older 3x500GB disks for a total of 6x500GB drives in one raid5 configuration. I'd also like to be able to drop more drives into the array when I require expansion. My issue is picking a raid card that I'll like. I had originally picked a 8 port SATA card which would've worked, but I've been pointed out to SAS cards. (Specifically this one) I've been googling for information regarding SAS Expanders but I'm a bit confused. The only expanders I can find are large U1 configurations that have like 12 or 36 ports. Is this representative of most SAS Expanders? What are my options for expansion friendly RAID cards? Do I just have to eat the price of a 8 or 16 Port SATA drive?
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Apr 12, 2008 22:04
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Ah, that really clears things up for me. It seems like the best solution for me is to buy a large controller and use port multipliers when I'm forced to. What I'm looking for in a card: 8x SATAII ports, PCI-E interface, parity calculation and cache on card. $500 is my absolute upper price, less than that is fantastic and preferred. Now I've obviously looked around and have been investigating cards, but I was wondering if anyone has any experience or advice in this regard.
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Apr 13, 2008 01:12
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As I stated in this thread before, I'm building a new NAS box. The Areca ARC-1280 I'm going to be buying supports online raid capacity expansion. I'm a bit puzzled about online expansion.... How does Windows Vista 64 Ultimate react to something like online expansion? Does the increased size just appear in Disk Management?  ing doesn't reveal much useful information. Because a lot of raid cards support this feature, searching for information regarding it ends up bringing me to raid cards instead of documentation.Also, what have people found for case solutions for largeish arrays? I'm currently looking at a Supermicro SuperChassis 846E1-R900B which has 24 drive backplane and room to mount a couple drives internally. I'm looking at about 25 drives total, what have other people gone with?
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May 13, 2008 01:22
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I've been building a new raid array for myself and I have a $400 lesson that should probably be mentioned in the OP. High end RAID Controllers should NOT be used with desktop (or 'consumer') grade hard drives. Enterprise level drives are the safe bet, however apparently some consumer grade western digital drives can be reconfigured to a low TLER. Consumer level hard drives have the ability to recover from write errors. This recovery takes a lot of time, easily going past 10 seconds. While the drive is recovering and relocating the data it stops communicating with the RAID controller and the controller assumes the drive has failed. This leads to array degradation which leads to volume failure which leads to tears. An enterprise level drive will throw an error out to the raid controller which will then use parody to recreate the data on another location on the harddrive. For more information see http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/learningresource/whitepapers/LearningResource_CCTL.html I'm now trying to pawn a few 1TB Consumer Harddrives off on friends. :p My config: ARC-1680ix-24, three generic consumer Segate 1TB harddives
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Sep 19, 2008 17:41
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Combat Pretzel posted:TLER is 7 seconds. Consumer level error recovery has generally time outs around 2 minutes. Which is a bitch, because it will have any hardware and software RAID stack declare your single-badly-broken-sector drive as dead if it comes across it. This isn't always the case, I have a really terrible raid controller (I paid $20 for it) which just keeps chugging. I'm going to buy three of these http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=503. An extra $300 
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Sep 19, 2008 19:36
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Many pages back I detailed my issues with using consumer level harddrives with an enterprise controller. I originally had problems of my consumer class drives timing out and dropping from the array. After researching this I found that when consumer drives encounter a bad sector the relocated the data. This relocation takes far too long and the controller assumes the drive is dead. The solution is to use Enterprise level drives. They have shorter timeouts (Western Digital calls this Time Limited Error Recovery or TLER). My card: Areca ARC-1680ix-24 A hojillion harddrives: WD RE3 1TB Time to by some SAS expanders 
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Feb 18, 2009 05:35
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