eSata Storage Enclosure

[RimBlock]

couldnt find a quiet psu for the netstor. decided to change tack for my build
All prices inc Vat
SFF8087 to 4 Sata QTY 2 = £24.96
RocketRaid RR2720SGL 8 Port SAS/SATA III RAID Controller QTY 1 = £125.98
Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 750W PC Power P9 BN174 QTY 1 = £137.57
Fractal Design Define XL Full Tower Case QTY 1 = £104.99
Total = £393.50.


Controller only has 8 ports (but controllers start getting a lot more expensive after 8 ports)
Case doesnt support hotswap, led indicators (not really required as long as i label up)
i am pretty sure Case will be silent.

Phase 1 - run htpc and storage case at same time, feed 1m sas/sata cables to storage case from controller.

Phase 2 - use the new storage case/psu for a new build i was planning anyways. save £250

all i need now is a good value/quiet 5.25 bay to 3.5 hdd converter to support a bit more HDDs storage in the fractal design, when required, given a future motherboard will support a 4-6 disk raid 5 array as well and the fractal design only has 10 bays.

any thoughts please, will these parts work together?
Any other good quality cases with 10+ hdd bays?

If you are really determined to get a Highpoint controller then why not the 2722 which has two external ports (SFF-8088). You could get some temp SFF-8088 -> SATA cables to run into the hard drive case and direct to the drives and then replace them with SFF-8088 -> SFF-8088 cables, a target SFF-8088 -> 0807 case bracket and a SFF-0807 -> 4x sata when the need arises. The difference in price between the 2720 and 2722 is only around US$60 in the US.

Second question would be why the 750W PSU. If you factor each drive as requiring 10-15W then you are significantly overrated (the PSU that is ). For 8 drives you could get away with a 150W Pico PSU with the brick in the case if needed. No noise at all but may need some quiet fans for HDD cooling.

3 -> 5 drives hotswap enclosures are around US$100 so maybe 80 quid. That would give you 15 (3x 3->5) with one bay left over. You would then need a SAS expander to handle all the drives and use a wide link (2x SFF-8088 -> controller). The only other realistic option for a single case to hold all those drives is a rack mount 4U case which can go upto 24 drives like the Norco 4224. I have a 4020 and it is great but in hindsight would now go for the 4220 as it uses one SFF-8087 connector per backplane rather than 4xSATA.

RB

 

[ginjaninja]

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.

 

[RimBlock]

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.

Nice find, very good price. Should be a bit of a monster when you finish it.

What are you planning to use it for with a LGA 2011 processor in it ?

RB

 

[ginjaninja]

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.

 

[ginjaninja]

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.