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[HTPC4ME]

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=390329935056&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Speeds decent?

Could i plug 2 of these into a pc with windows home server on it and use the 2nd as a backup solution?

think she'll have enough power to handle all drives being 3 tera?

They claim any size drive capability... seems hard to believe?!

Suggestions on controller cards?

What kinda horsepower on pc would i need to handle all these drives? suggestions on cheap pc parts to make this work?

Thanks for any help.

[HTPC4ME]

it's like pulling teeth with people i tell ya


My questions
where can i get these controller cards?
what kind of connection would i need on pc to plug the cards into?
could i plug 2 of these units into one pc, if the pc had windows home server on it?
If the pc had windows home server on it, could I share all files within home network?

Is there a warranty?

Sellers reply -
you can get the cards on ipcdirect.net. PCI-Express. yes, 2 units in one pc for windows home server. 1 year manufacturer warranty.

[HTPC4ME]

and the kicker...
he doesnt accept returns

[MrHaugen]

You've hit the spot with the manufacturer at least. After a lot of searching I found Norco provided the best products to such a welcoming price. I have however aimed a bit higher than you. It all depends how much storage you need really, and how far ahead you think. I don't want to be limited to 15 bays Norco have so cheap products, that I only looked closely to their bigger and badder units.

The good options you have is:
DS-24ER  - http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=8&modelno=ds-24er
This is the cream in my opinion.
- Double PSU
- 24 drives
- one single connection
- good scalability
- Supports any disks as far as I know
- OS and Raid card independent
You get this for 1500$ +

DS-24E - http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=8&modelno=ds-24e
This is the king when it comes to price and size and expansion possibilities.
- 24 drives
- one single connection
- good scalability
- Supports any disks as far as I know
- OS and Raid card independent
You get this for 1300$ +

DS-1500 - http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=8&modelno=ds-1500
This one is affordable indeed, and it has some room for disks. 15 vs 24 on the big brothers. You get it for 685$ +?
The problem with this one is several compared to the others:
- The port multiplexers has it's issues. I think they are somewhat less efficient than a good expander (just a hunch)
- 3 port multiplexers is be less reliable than 1 expander chip
- Less disks and less disks pr server rack Unit (physical space and perhaps shipping cost)
- Might be more picky on the disk sizes etc.
- No direct expansion possibilities
- More cables
- Does not support Raid 6
Price: Around 685$ and up?

There is also some storage solutions with 12 Bays, that also supports motherboards. A more all in one solution, which you can add more HDD cases on top of of course. But I like it nice and tidy. Separate the server and storage solution. So I did not consider that.

The biggest problems with the DS-1500 in my opinion, is the numbers of bays available and that it runs Silicon image Port Multipliers.
- Silicon Image PM's, means that there is almost only Silicon image Raid controllers you can run this thing on (need a sil chipset. Not sure which). I've purchased a few Port Multiplexers my self (just like those in that cabinet I think), and tried to make my self a chap ass super storage system. I gave up because of the incompatibility with good raid controller cards. When you have so much disks, you need a good hardware based raid controller to put the weight of the PC/server. The lack of Raid 6 possibility is not good either in so big storage systems. The expander that is in the DS-24E is considered very high quality, and the Silicon chips is mediocre at best I think.
- The number of bays was also important in my decision. 15 vs 24 is 7 disks less than DS-24E. It is quite possible that I want to expand this further, and I don't want my basement filled with server cabinets.


The great thing about the DS-24E is that you can link the unit to several other expanders and use it as a less high output unit, but massive storage solution.
I my self have a HighPoint RocketRAID 4320 card with two internal min-SAS ports (might be smart to get external ports for this cabinets). One of this ports is linked directly to the DS-24E. So I can easily add two DS-24E with almost max throughput. If you don't want to get a Raid controller with more ports, you can link the DS-24E cabinets together! So, you can for example have one cheeper Raid controller with one mini-SAS port, connect the DS-24E to that port, and another DS-24E to the other DS-24E. The output will suffer of course. The maximum horsepowers is used a bit before you add the 24'th disk in one of the cabinets. But it's a hell of a lot of disks for a reasonable amount of cash.


I think the Norco products is so cheap, so I did not even consider the DS-1500, but it might be enough for you. I purchased my Norco products a few days ago, and will not get them before my summer holiday starts, so I will not be able to test it for a month or so. But I can give you a report once I get them and test how they work. It has only gotten good reviews from others though, so it should not be a downer anyway. My conclusion is that I would go for one DS-24E over two DS-1500.

[HTPC4ME]

thank you sir

[MrHaugen]

Updated with what I have researched so far. I usually do spend quite a lot of hours on Internet before I purchase such things Don't have any hands on experience with my suggested components yet though.

[HTPC4ME]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133047&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Server+-+RAID+Sub-Systems-_-Norco+Technologies+Inc.-_-16133047

so if i were to upgrade to the middle class one, what would be needed on pc end?
cards needed?
and what kind of pc would be needed? (hardware/power wise)
 i suppose i could upgrade and get the one and keep doing manual backups via docking station. was just hoping to get into 2 units and be able to setup automatic backups. i use my 15 bay now in jbod mode and will continue to on new setup. i just dont want to take the chance of raid going down, or wasting storage space.

Thanks for the Great info BTW

[MrHaugen]

You don't need that much. All three alternatives would require approximately the same PC/Server and raid controller. Only thing that might need a decent machine is if you decide to run TrueCrypt or similar, to encrypt all disks (as I have). This require some CPU power.

Pretty much any machine can run this, as long as it's a real Hardware raid controller that does all the processing. And to take advantage of the throughput of this units, you'll have to use Raid Cards for at least 8x PCI-E buss.

To connect the unit and raid card you'll need one Mini-SAS SFF 8088 to 8088 cable, external to external. IF you purchase a card with internal connections you might need two cables an a converter from internal (SFF-8087) to external (SFF-8088). Or a single cable that have connections from internal to external. Not sure about this. But when you go for this solutions the best thing would be to get external raid controller connections anyway!

As I mentioned, I have a HighPoint RocketRAID 4320 with two internal Mini-SAS ports my self (this one is a few years old, so you might want to check newer models). This is supposed to be a rather good card, and it have worked in all my MS 2003 and 2008 servers I have set up. I have not tried it on linux or anything yet, but I think those are supported too. If you like, you could go for a cheaper card with 1 Mini-SAS connection, but this would also mean that you can not just add another box and get the same throughput. There will be some limitations with for example 48 disks vs 24 disks on one SAS cable. Not sure how much impact though. It's up to the controller, what it can take I think. As far as the Cable and DS-24E units go, I think they can throughput up to 2400MB/s, so you should be able to daisy chain at least two expanders on one port without suffering to much. The HighPoint RocketRAID 4310 as an example have a limit at 800 MB/s on one port. So this is where it will struggle. Two ports and two boxes is twice as good. So, you'll gain in performance if you expand one day.

The important thing to remember when purchasing a Raid Controller card is:
- How fast a PCI-E slot is required. You should aim at 8x or 16x
- If its a REAL hardware raid controller
- Supported Raid types (you should require Raid 5 or 6 for storage space, speed and safety)
- How many ports and what type (E-Sata or mini-SAS)
- OS support and disk support
The same things apply for a E-SATA raid card as well. Only difference is that you need much more ports. So the price difference in this field is not much. One thing you CAN do to lower the cost is to go for a software raid controller, but I doubt that you'll get software raid controllers with mini-SAS ports. And it will reduce the speed of the unit. Significantly I think. So, it's a no no imo.

Other than that, I would search for different models and check out reviews for this cards. Make sure all of my points above if checked, and then compare it against other models for price and speed for your desired Raid setup (1,5,6,10 etc).

Two quick suggestions based on my experience, from Highpoint:
HighPoint RocketRAID 4322 (2 external mini-SAS ports) - 350$ +
HighPoint RocketRAID 4310 (1 external mini-SAS ports, same chip, but half the RAM?) - 280$+


And a few comments about 15 disks in JBOD; are you mad? If ONE of your disks fail, your entire disk setup with be destroyed. All your data. JBOD is used with a very few disks, of it's even used at all. It gives you poor performance and it's 15 times LESS secure than a single disk. At least consider using Raid 5. This will only use a total of 1/15 of your disks for parity data, and it can reconstruct all your data if one disk fails. If you don't need the security, then set it up as a Raid 0 for a lot better performance What's good with the 24 bay disk expanders is that you have so much space that you can make several arrays, and do what you like with them. You could add one array of 12 disks with raid 6 for great speed and great security, and you could use the other disks in Raid 5 with great speed and good security. It would act like a double backup really, while you know you get the speed. And the automatic backups would go very fast....

I don't know what your existing cabinet can do. But JBOD is scary. Even for backups. I've never used it. One of your disks is bound to go to hell one day or another.

[HTPC4ME]

thanks for the info on the cards

Could you elaborate on raid please?

If ONE of your disks fail, your entire disk setup with be destroyed. All your data.

I was under assumption JBOD (The reading i've done and people ive spoke with) is the only way NOT to have the whole system go down and loose all data? since i've had my jbod setup (4 years now for 16 bay unit. ive had 3-4 drives go bad due to old age. and all other drives were fine.

http://storagemojo.com/2010/02/27/does-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/
what's always scared me about raid. is the link above. that there is a chance 2 go bad, and then your data is all lost. jbod only one drives data would be lost, and then you just put in the backed up drive and buy a new drive to backup that drive.

it's 15 times LESS secure than a single disk

what do you mean by less secure? in what ways?

thanks for any clarification MrHaugen.

[HTPC4ME]

just an FYI.. this is what i use for my backups. goes really fast - http://www.superflexible.com/index.htm

[MrHaugen]

It might seem like I exaggerated a BIT when it comes to JBOD. Just never saw it as an option, and have not read about it in many, many years. I thought the data was distributed a bit more than like Raid 0, and that one drive failure would destroy all data. It ssems though that it only destroys data that is on that disk, or files that starts at one disk and continues to a second or third disk. There will not be many cases of this, so this is not catastrophic. But it will hurt to loose 2TB of data if it's your valuable music collection. At least in my case. If you have two identical JBOD setups, you might swap disks if one fail, and you should be pretty safe. But you'll get no benefits of the power a raid gives you, and you'll waste a lot of space imo. It might be a good thing to have if you have much old disks with varying sizes though. But I would not have used it entirely as backup or a platform for much reading or writing.

The article you refer to is pretty gloom. This article on the other hand, shows that the situation is not as dark as one would think: http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/raid-recovery/. I think that todays raid controllers is able to handle this errors on rebuilds. If your controller do not support that, you also have the possibility of running so called Scrubbing, which will check the disks on a regular basis, for faulty sectors or blocks. If it finds one it will repair it with the parity data. This can for instance be scheduled to run at night, one time each month. You should be pretty safe from such errors then. I agree that raid 5 is not secure enough though. I would only go for raid 6 on such huge storage solutions.

You should also have in mind that the problem gets bigger and rebuilds take longer time as the array increase in size. So I would advice you to split the disks into a few arrays. I will split the array in about 14-16 and 8-10 disks my self. The 8 to 10 disk raid 6 array will serve hold a copy (backup) of my most important data (documents, music and series), and and the other one will be my main storage with everything. I do not care THAT much if such a rare case of a total breakdown of a array would wipe out my movies as an example. I can download them again in a few days.

I user Super Flexible sync my self. Will probably continue using that for the backup replication.

[jmone]

Good thread!  FYI my perspective is:
- RAID: Good for uptime in case a drive fails you can continue while the failed drive is removed and replaced.  It is however not a "backup" soln where you need a second copy somewhere (eg on the original discs or a second array)
- JBOD: Simple and easy to present all disks as one vol, and if one fails you only lose the data on this drive. 

I have given up on both RAID and JBOD a while ago for MC, simply because the complexity did not provide any advantage as:
1) MC will present all of your media in it's consolidated Views hence hiding what physical drive the stuff is on anyway, just map each drive using UNC (eg \\Server\Drive1... etc etc)
2) The Windows SW (including the hacks) inbuilt JBOD/RAID support is terrible as you can not expand it once they are created.
3) All my media is either backed up on the original disc OR in case of stuff I don't have on disc (eg Home Videos) or don't want to rip again (eg Music) - these are backed up to a separate WHS box.  The WHS box is in a different location and can event be removed when we are on holidays giving true backup.  It also protects from deletes etc as I manually control the backup of the media to the WHS box so if the kids delete one of the Home Videos by mistake, I've still got a copy.

My 2cents worth.

PS - I wish we got the Norco stuff cheap down in our part of the world - they look great!

[HTPC4ME]

Well Mr. Haugen. i think i'm going to jump into the 24 bay unit and keep my trusty jbod. thanks for all the input, and great convo would love to still here your results, opinions once you get all setup

Hey jmone, long time... quick question if i may...

2) The Windows SW (including the hacks) inbuilt JBOD/RAID support is terrible as you can not expand it once they are created.

what do you mean?
also

I have given up on both RAID and JBOD a while ago for MC, simply because the complexity did not provide any advantage as:

what do you use then? i thought the only options were JBOD or raid?

[Daydream]

Well Mr. Haugen. i think i'm going to jump into the 24 bay unit and keep my trusty jbod. thanks for all the input, and great convo would love to still here your results, opinions once you get all setup

Hey jmone, long time... quick question if i may...  what do you mean?

You put 20 drives in JBOD. You bring in another 4, you start a new JBOD, you can't add them to the original 20.

Do not assume that if you had a JBOD setup and you retained the rest of data when a drive failed, it will always be like that. It is never a given. The OS implementations and the controllers implementations VARY and you may find yourself in a situation when a JBOD drive failure means exactly losing everything.

also  what do you use then? i thought the only options were JBOD or raid?

Where does RAID/JBOD matters? Aggregation -> one big drive for everything, and speed -> combined speed of drives. The degree of redundancy (1,2, +hotspares, etc) is subjective to needs so I'll leave that on the side. Aggregation is a non issue because MC will scan all possible paths you indicate (it'll be just once at the beginning when you have to add them all in) and present them all, "aggregated", database-style, with metadata and whatnot. Speed... what speed? Nobody needs RAID speed for HTPC-related media. One drive alone has enough speed to stream 20 Blu-rays! Your network will give up first.

So yeah, I ran stuff using all alphabet's letters. Run out of alphabet's letters? Mount points! With symlinks! Or FlexRaid! Or whatever... Never in my life I will accept to pay $1000 (or more) for a RAID controller because there is nothing else that would hold 20+ drivers but an enterprise solution. RAID is a money black hole. Additional drives for redundancy. Additional drives for hot spares. More drives if somethings goes bad and OMG you have to buy them _immediately_ because you are already living dangerous at the mercy of the parity and if a second-third thingie fails, ALL your data goes to Nirvana.

So there, you have my 2 cents too, although a little bit late in the game .

[MrHaugen]

A 300$ raid controller can hold 128 disks. You'll not get max speed of course. But not many need it so much. And no, I do not think that one disk can support streaming of 20 HD movies. Unless you talk about SSD perhaps. There is not only throughput of MB/S that will struggle, but also the seek time of the drive head movement involved. Show me a normal disk supporting this, and I'll buy a bunch of them right away.

I don't agree that raid is such a huge money drain. With raid you don't have to have backup of every data, because the raid it self is a half good backup solution. I will never trust a raid completely my self, and will always have at least two copies of my most important data, such as music and documents. But other things might as well just stay on a Raid 6 array by it self. So, I can have 24 disks. Use for instance 6 for backup in Raid 5 (less array and smaller chance of rebuild errors), 18 for other data in Raid 6. I'll loose 3 disks for parity data in both raid 5 and 6. So. 3 disks for parity, 5 for backup data. That is 8 disks for backup purpose, 16 disks for data. Include the speed, the easiness of having just two drives, several computers streaming content on your network, and I would say that there is more benefits of a good raid setup.

That's at least my situation. I agree with the use of JBOD though. I would much rather use independent disks. There is to much risk involved with JBOD. The simple example of faulty controller/motherboard (similar to what xtacbyme is talking about), and not being able to recreate it on a new one is a good example.

[jmone]

So it is all a balance of what you want, price, complexity etc:  The three main choices I see for a HTPC are
1) Raid 5/6: Need a controller, it is more expensive and complex --> give protection from drive failures but it is not a backup as there is no second copy to protect from accidental deletion and anything that causes the array to fail (fire, theft etc)
2) JOBD: Gives no real advantage to MC users but adds complexity.  Avoid like the plague
3) None:  Using Independent discs is easy and simple as long as you have enough sata ports though there is no protection from drive failures (note: if you have a backup then it does not matter as long as you are happy to restore from the backup).  MC will still present all media in a consolidated view (this is how xtacbyme has it setup now, each drive is reference by a UNC path, eg \\Media1, \\Media2 etc etc).

[HTPC4ME]

oh oh, maybe i've been mistaken on how i'm setup.. Jmone isnt what i'm doing considered JBOD?

[jmone]

Nope - JBOD "joins" the disks at the OS level into one drive letter so you get a "single massive disk". 

[HTPC4ME]

ohhh ok... thanks for clarification.

So my next question... whats the technical term of what i'm doing/using...

And if buying both of these 24 bay units. how will i get past the drive letter limit in windows server?

i need the 24 for data, and another 24 for backups.

Thanks.

[Daydream]

how will i get past the drive letter limit in windows server?

i need the 24 for data, and another 24 for backups.

You can't. Anything past 24 letters (combined, all hdd's, optical, USB drives) will stop showing up.
Then if it works for you, you can use mount points, so a drive doesn't show up as, say, F: but as c:\Drive1\, meaning this whole new drive appears as folder Drive1 on drive c:\. You can have more than one mount point for a drive (it can be F:\ and C:\Drive1\ at the same time). You can do the mounting with the Disk management console.

[DarkPenguin]

Nope - JBOD "joins" the disks at the OS level into one drive letter so you get a "single massive disk".  

Um, really?

Whatever you end up getting be aware this will be loud.

Oh, and I think this has been covered but I'll state it again.  RAID is about uptime or speed and not backup.  The uptime part is often mistaken to be a backup but it isn't as it doesn't handle PICNIC problems.

I now return you to the helpful replies.

[DarkPenguin]

You can't. Anything past 24 letters (combined, all hdd's, optical, USB drives) will stop showing up.
Then if it works for you, you can use mount points, so a drive doesn't show up as, say, F: but as c:\Drive1\, meaning this whole new drive appears as folder Drive1 on drive c:\. You can have more than one mount point for a drive (it can be F:\ and C:\Drive1\ at the same time). You can do the mounting with the Disk management console.

This works pretty well.  You can mount one disk as a "M:" and stuff all your music under the M:Music directory.  Then you mount a disk as M:\Video for your video and M:\Images for your images, etc.

[glynor]

I've had trouble using volume Mount Points in the past.

The biggest issue seems to be that Windows will no longer report the volume free space in a rational manner, and software that depends on this functionality can break spectacularly.  An example would be MC's Handheld system.  I once tried to use a volume Mount Point (mounting a USB flash drive to C:\library_data\handheld\) and MC got all confused about the available space on the disk (this may be fixed now, I don't know, it was a long time ago I tried that plan).  There are also other software incompatibilities I've seen, and problems with the recycle bin on volumes mounted this way.

They work, and you should be fine if you're not using old, command line, or "junky" software.  But, use caution.

PS. JBOD scares the crap out of me.

[MrHaugen]

Remember that you can purchase cheaper units if you only require JBOD, or nothing but standard disks, 1 to 1. Is it called port multipliers instead? I'm not sure.

[jmone]

Sorry I've been lax with my terms:  For more on JBOD see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-RAID_drive_architectures  - I was referring to JBOD-SPAN where the the discs are joined as one (this was possible with a hack in WinXP).  It is not too bad:
+'ve: One Drive Letter for all discs and it is at the OS level
+'ve: Discs can be different sizes, types, etc
      : Data is only on one disc (it is not stripped liked Raid 0) so which there is not performace gain, if you lose one disc you could (in theory) get the data off the others.
-'ve: In practice you needed to hack the OS to enable it (and no idea in Win7)
-'ve: You could set it up but then you could not break it up, expanded it etc etc

It's not scary, just it offers no practical advantage to MC users and a bunch of negatives.

I also don't like mount points has glynor points out, you get odd issues with "free space" and this was one of the reasons MS moved away from it's Drive Extender technology (built on mount points) for WHS.  This however does give me another idea that may be suitable as a more advanced JBOD-SPAN option are the Drive Extender replacement offerings like DriveBender http://www.drivebender.com/