eSata Storage Enclosure

long term solution will be a larger case with lga 2011 pc.
hence the internal ports and larger psu.

i am not sold on cheaper marvel based highpoint controllers, they seem to offer very bad performance / no better than software, but they offer raid 5. I have decided to go with a flex raid solution on an hba instead for raid 5. that said by the time the x79 premium boards come out they may well support 10+ hdds and i can use their raid instead.(wont be any worse than highpoint)

i have found a coolermaster 3x 5.25 to x 3.5 hdd for £13. This coupled with Fractal case will suppport 14 hdds which will be enough for me, at a fraction of the cost of formal chasis.
 
it is for my next long term build,
Gaming, Media, VMware, Storage, all in one PC.

thanks for the comprehensive guidance and suggestions.
I am confident i have ended up with close to perfect solution for me.

My conclusion.
for a good value, home user, 8-14 disk storage server, supporting redundancy for convenience rather than 'mission criticality', a normal atx (possibly end of life) pc build, case, power supply with 120mm fans+, normal sata hba, and software flexraid 5 is a good option - v. high storage capability, quiet and minimum cost.
.
Basic External enclosures, possibly with raid inbuilt, possibly with nas services, are significantly more money. External enclosures win on convenience but at a v. high premium of at least 2x+ the price (x4+ if you are running the pc in any case, xX?+ when considering large/raid enclosures and nas services) . External enclosures are possibly more energy efficient per mb served but if you have the need for a pc to be on most/all the time anyways, this is a moot point. NAS storage has v. low bandwidth to your main pc albeit good enough for a media server.

rocket raid 622 highpoint raid controllers don't seem to offer better performance than windows software and hopefully Flexraid (at least on a 3.6ghz q6600).

If mission criticality was a concern then for a large disks eg 2tb, you possibly need to consider a more expensive raid 6 card as the rebuild time is very long (36hrs on 2tb Samsung f4 on rocket raid 622) and another disk may fail in that time.

an external enclosure seems to take 40 seconds to initialise in post.which isnt good.

unraid looks like an option as well to consider. It has a license cost but can turn an old pc with hdd bays (check compatibility) into a NAS service.

not too late to disagree robustly; as things stand i have only purchased the hba and 5.25 converter for an additional 4 hdds in my existing case/psu c. £80.
 
Last edited:
should have read the manual; flexraid doesnt support raid 5....its raid 4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_4
potentially poor performance when writing to two disks....needs a fast parity disk to prevent write bottleneck
although for media storage with infrequent changes, the parity can be built at intervals rather than on fly.
all the data is accessible outside the array, so multiple disks can be read at the same time...looks ideal for a media server..further investigation required.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom