Thoughts on RAID hardware controller please

kirkster · 8 Jun 2018 at 12:15

I have a ton of photos and video and want to build a RAID array of 8TB disks. I will boot off of a 500GB primary SSD and point all storage at the RAID array. Anyone got any thoughts on doing that?

Would appreciate you having direct experience of the RAID controller you spec.
Must support multi disk RAID.

Thanks.

Armageus · 8 Jun 2018 at 12:18

What's the purpose of this storage?
What RAID level are you considering?
Why not a pre-built NAS appliance?
Why not a Software RAID solution / NAS OS?

All these are questions that are of a higher priority imo than which hardware raid controller
(I have direct experience will Dell Perc / LSI and HP Smartarray RAID controllers fwiw)

kirkster · 8 Jun 2018 at 12:32

Storage is for video and photos and general documents. I have 10 TB's of stuff.
RAID 6 or 10 is what I was thinking.
I have a Synology DS217+ already on my network. I do not think it would have the performance and this RAID is for the local machine.
Software RAID a possibility.... I discounted it because of speed?

Armageus · 8 Jun 2018 at 13:29

Personally for the use case a NAS (e.g. a bigger Synology or a self built FreeNAS etc) box would still seem to fit the bill. Struggling to see the performance need from your requirements, or even why it must be local.

Software RAID would be using something like ZFS on top of a "dumb" sata controller, but with a reasonable CPU would easily equal the performance of a hardware RAID controller when using Hard Drives (as opposed to SSDs)