Soldato
- Joined
- 2 Nov 2007
- Posts
- 4,185
I have three of the Supermicro 846TQ-R900B's myself; £550 each but they come with rails, dual redundant PSU's and the build quality is really good.
Best pci Sata controller?
- Thread starter Messiah Khan
- Start date
- Joined
- 1 Sep 2005
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- 10,000
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- Scottish Highlands
3! These for personal use? Yeah they look very nice as well, but definately out of my budget. Hopefully I can pick up a good enough PSU for ~£50, so that's £300 all in for the case. Then another £100 for the controller card and £15 for the NIC. The rest I already have. That will make a 4TB/3.5TB/2TB (depending on what RAID or backup I decide to go with) storage server for £415.
Soldato
- Joined
- 2 Nov 2007
- Posts
- 4,185
3! These for personal use? Yeah they look very nice as well, but definately out of my budget. Hopefully I can pick up a good enough PSU for ~£50, so that's £300 all in for the case. Then another £100 for the controller card and £15 for the NIC. The rest I already have. That will make a 4TB/3.5TB/2TB (depending on what RAID or backup I decide to go with) storage server for £415.
Yes, mostly personal.
Be sure to enable staggered spinup for your drives if the contoller supports this, it stops you PSU getting a very high load all of a sudden plus it lets you use a lower powered PSU. Otherwise with 20 drives you might be using 500-700w at startup for just the disks alone.
I have one of the AAR 21610SA cards sat on my shelf. I had intended to use it for a RAID5 array, but as you say it is limited to 2TB for arrays. There is a workaround that is to create sub 2TB raid 5 arrays, and then stripe them, however this is very wasteful in terms of parity drives, and doesn't add anything in terms or redundancy. I then moved to software raid, which can be done, again annoying as you have to create a JBOD array for each drive in the cards bios for the operating system to be able to access them, however my main problem, and indeed the one that caused me to replace the card was that it really does not like Samsung or Seagate drives, and would randomly not pick the drives up on reboot. I had to disable auto update on the OS to ensure that the server would not reboot overnight and destroy the array. In conclusion the Adaptec card is too old really to be used with drives over 750GB if you wish to use RAID5, and you would be better off using, as I did a couple of Supermicro 8 port SATA cards (@£60ish new) or your mainboards sata ports via multipliers (x 5 per port)