RAID

MADMAN

MADMAN

MADMAN

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I have been eyeing up the new WD 3TB red hard disks that is designed for NAS units. I am looking to buy a MSI Z77-D65 motherboard and at least 3/4x3TB red hard disks which will be set up in RAID 0 or 1.

So a few questions came to mind:

1.These new drives are SATA III and most Z77 motherboards have two separate SATA III controllers. Can you RAID 0 or 1 4 drives in SATA III?

2.If I am unable to RAID with the current SATA III controllers then the next option is a RAID card. So which brand, model do you suggest ?

3. Is there any options?

Your suggestions and recommendation would be greatful :D
 
I'd have a think about what you actually want out of a RAID array, as RAID 0 and RAID 1 are two totally different configurations....
 
As above.

RAID 0 has no redundancy, RAID 1 has redundancy but isn't a backup solution.

The Z77 motherboards won't have 4 Intel SATA 3 ports as the chipset only supports 2.

There may be motherboards with 4 SATA 3 ports from an add in controller but I imagine these would be at the high end.

As far as I know there are no HDDs which will saturate SATA 2 yet so you could use 4 Intel SATA 2 ports.
 
i agree stick em on the sata2 ports,its not because they are sata3 hdd's that they are a little faster its just the drive itself

you can use an ssd or two on the intel sata3 ports for your os ect
 
Good idea as in putting the 4 WD red on the SATA 2 ports, but I had plans to connect my existing 4x WD Green 2TB hard disks from my old rig.

Reading other posts concerning the performance of WD Green 2TB in RAID array, it doesnt seem a good idea. However there have been mix fortunes concerning those drives.

So it sounds like its leaning towards the RAID card option - I was thinking of getting a LSI MRSAS9260-4I/SGL MegaRAID 4PT (upto x32 Drives) SAS/SATA 3 - 6Gb/s PCI-e 2.0 RAID SGL

I could opt for going down the X79 route but thats going into silly money compared to the performance. Saying that the RAID card is £265.

Flipping a coin moment :D

Therefore the suggested setup is as follows:


MB: MSI Z77A-GD65 (NEW)
PSU: 850W Corsair Professional Series Gold, and Corsair Individually Sleeved Modular Cable upgrade kit (NEW)
CASE: Corsair Obsidian Series 550D (NEW)
HEATSINK Corsair H100 Hydro Series Extreme Performance CPU cooler (NEW)
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770K,1155 (NEW)
SSD:480GB Corsair Force Series GS (NEW)
RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair DDR3 Vengeance Jet Black, PC3-12800 (1600), Non-ECC, CAS 9-9-9-24, XMP, 1.50V (NEW)
HDD: 4x2TB WD Green (EXISTING)
HDD 4x3TB WD Red (NEW)
RAID CARD: LSI MRSAS9260-4I/SGL
GPU: ATI 5870 2GB (EXISTING)
SOUND: Creative SB X-Fi (EXISTING)

CASE FANS:
3x120mm Corsair Air Series SP120 Quiet Edition, High Pressure, 1450rpm, 37.85CFM, 23dB, 3-Pin,
2x120mm Corsair Air Series SP120 High Performance Edition, High Pressure, 2350rpm, 62.74CFM, 35dB, 3-Pin
 
Last edited:
MADMAN said:
Good idea as in putting the 4 WD red on the SATA 2 ports, but I had plans to connect my existing 4x WD Green 2TB hard disks from my old rig.

Reading other posts concerning the performance of WD Green 2TB in RAID array, it doesnt seem a good idea. However there have been mix fortunes concerning those drives.

So it sounds like its leaning towards the RAID card option - I was thinking of getting a LSI MRSAS9260-4I/SGL MegaRAID 4PT (upto x32 Drives) SAS/SATA 3 - 6Gb/s PCI-e 2.0 RAID SGL

I could opt for going down the X79 route but thats going into silly money compared to the performance. Saying that the RAID card is £265.

Flipping a coin moment :D

Therefore the suggested setup is as follows:


MB: MSI Z77A-GD65 (NEW)
PSU: 850W Corsair Professional Series Gold, and Corsair Individually Sleeved Modular Cable upgrade kit (NEW)
CASE: Corsair Obsidian Series 550D (NEW)
HEATSINK Corsair H100 Hydro Series Extreme Performance CPU cooler (NEW)
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770K,1155 (NEW)
SSD:480GB Corsair Force Series GS (NEW)
RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair DDR3 Vengeance Jet Black, PC3-12800 (1600), Non-ECC, CAS 9-9-9-24, XMP, 1.50V (NEW)
HDD: 4x2TB WD Green (EXISTING)
HDD 3x3TB WD Red (NEW)
RAID CARD: LSI MRSAS9260-4I/SGL
GPU: ATI 5870 2GB (EXISTING)
SOUND: Creative SB X-Fi (EXISTING)

CASE FANS:
3x120mm Corsair Air Series SP120 Quiet Edition, High Pressure, 1450rpm, 37.85CFM, 23dB, 3-Pin,
2x120mm Corsair Air Series SP120 High Performance Edition, High Pressure, 2350rpm, 62.74CFM, 35dB, 3-Pin
Click to expand...

If you are looking for performance forget the 480GB Corsair SSD and go for 2x240GB SSDs in RAID0 to boot off (240GB SSDs often have higher performance than their bigger brothers and in RAID0 no contest). As to the HDDs I guess your using them for storage so you are not going to gain that much by RAIDing them up but you will lose a lot if one of them fails in RAID. So perhaps you can save some money and complexity by not having them in RAID.

The money you save by not going RAID you could spend on the rest of the system like going X79.
 
@Kaapstad - I fully agree that 2 SSDs in RAID 0 will be a better performer than a sing SSD.

Currently my 4x WD 2TB Green hdds are not in RAID but standalones. I have been pondering on the option of running the 4x3TB red on a RAID 1. At the end of the day the Green and Red WD hard disks are going to be used for a media file server.

The setup itself is for a dual setup, gamer and home server. The alternative to RAID is JBOD.

In respect to upgrading to the X79, will the controllers on the motherboard provide the same output a decided RAID card. I think it wont personally, but I happy to listen to peoples views on that point.

Something else to consider is the PSU have another juice for the current suggested hardware?

The cost comparsion between the X79 system and Z77 and RAID would be..

X79
4x 3TB red hard disks - £588
CPU:Intel Core i7-3930K 3.20GHz - £460
MB:Gigabyte X79-UD5 - £242

Total £1290

Z77

4x 3TB red hard disks - £588
MB: MSI Z77A-GD65 - £150
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770K - £260
RAID CARD: LSI MRSAS9260-4I/SGL - £260

Total £1258

From that basic calculation, very simular in price, but the Z77 board would still have more expansion as to the other SATA ports on the motherboard - 4 x SATA III

If I go down the X79 I would need to stick with a single SSD as to the available connections.
 
MADMAN said:
I have been pondering on the option of running the 4x3TB red on a RAID 1.
Click to expand...

RAID 1 (mirroring) is a setup using only 2 identical drives, each drive is a perfect copy of the other so if one goes down you can still continue to work. You cannot create a RAID 1 array with 4 disks.

If you've got 4 identical drives can I suggest you look into either a RAID 5 array or probably the better option RAID 10. RAID 10 in your case would be two groups of 2 disks that are mirrored then both mirrored groups are then striped together. This option gives you better redundancy than RAID 5 as well as maintaining a modicum of speed, although it does halve your data capacity.

MADMAN said:
The setup itself is for a dual setup, gamer and home server. The alternative to RAID is JBOD
Click to expand...

JBOD is NOT an alternative to RAID it's 'just a bunch of disks' offering no redundancy and unless you want one massive virtual drive it offers very little to most end users. I mean why would you want a 12TB drive!? The backups would take all week :p

Not wishing to sound disrespectful or anything, but can I suggest you have a little read up on RAID, even if it's just the wiki page - link

Judging by the monumental amounts of data you must have, I'd hate for you to lose some of your data through implementing the wrong RAID setup and also not having a proper backup plan. :)
 
MADMAN said:
but the Z77 board would still have more expansion as to the other SATA ports on the motherboard - 4 x SATA III
Click to expand...

I don't quite get that.

The Z77 board has:

  • 4 Intel SATA 2 ports
  • 2 Intel SATA 3 ports
  • 2 SATA 3 ports from an ASMedia ASM 1061 chipset
The X79 Board has:

  • 4 Intel SATA 2 ports
  • 2 Intel SATA 3 ports
  • 3 Marvell 88SE9172 chips providing :
  • 4 x SATA 3 ports
  • 2 x eSATA 3 ports on the back panel
  • Support for SATA RAID 0 and RAID 1
 
@Survevor

I was referring to 4x SATA III (2 Intel and 2 ASM chipset) with conjunction to the RAID card that has 4 ports if SATA III.

On the X79 I wouldnt need a separate RAID card as I would use 4 Intel sata 2 ports for my WD Green and on the marvell 4x SATA 3 ports for the WD Red drives.

As to backup plan I am building server machine that doubles as a download machine. I was thinking on NAS external drive, but in two minds

Another option is two build two separate pc's - one a games machine and the other a media server. As coupe69 suggested RAID 10 setup would be ideal as to the amount of data being stored.
 
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