Looking for a suitable RAID controller

[egd]

I recently assembled a new PC using an Abit AW8-MAX motherboard and am looking for a compatible RAID controller to run 4 x 400GB SATAII drives in a RAID5 config.

Looking at the Adaptec, Promise and 3Com solutions all seem to support server boards rather than desktops. Any ideas ?

 

[egd]

I recently assembled a new PC using an Abit AW8-MAX motherboard and am looking for a compatible RAID controller to run 4 x 400GB SATAII drives in a RAID5 config.

Looking at the Adaptec, Promise and 3Com solutions all seem to support server boards rather than desktops. Any ideas ?

The motherboard spec can be viewed here: http://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=AW8-MAX&fMTYPE=LGA775

It offers the following PCI slots:
* 1 x PCI-E X16 slot, 2 x PCI-E X1 slots
* 2 x PCI slots

 

[sechs]

Okkay. I'll ask.

Why would you want to do that?

 

[egd]

Okkay. I'll ask.

Why would you want to do that?

Because I'm in the process of ripping over 1,200 cd's (owned) to FLAC format for a music jukebox and backing all that up doesn't seem cost effective..?

 

[Bozo]

Try 3Ware.
http://www.3ware.com/3ware_home.htm

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[time]

1. It sounds like you don't really need RAID at all. RAID redundancy is in real time, whereas copying from one set of drives to another whenever you got around to it would work just as well. Also, you may care to make the backup set removable for extra safety.

2. I can't imagine why you would need the extra transfer rate from RAID 5 striping.

3. Your motherboard already supports RAID 5 out of the box, under Windows anyway.

 

[egd]

1. It sounds like you don't really need RAID at all. RAID redundancy is in real time, whereas copying from one set of drives to another whenever you got around to it would work just as well. Also, you may care to make the backup set removable for extra safety.

2. I can't imagine why you would need the extra transfer rate from RAID 5 striping.

3. Your motherboard already supports RAID 5 out of the box, under Windows anyway.

Agreed, the mobo does support R5, however, I've been burned before relying on on-board raid chipsets and not being able to get to the data after a mobo failure.

The RAID5 solution is attractive because it's a "set and forget" solution - will safeguard my data unless I have a power surge or something along those lines in which case nothing but an offline backup would suffice.

 

[Mercutio]

Can I say that I think you're looking at the wrong solution?

I'd suggest finding three Sony ES CD Jukeboxes. They can be managed from an RS-232 interface if you really need to interface with a computer. They will store your CDs with ZERO chance of data loss and with the same level of quality as a bunch of FLAC files.



Ripping 1200 CDs doesn't sound like any fun at all. It kind of sounds like punishment for something.

 

[time]

Agreed, the mobo does support R5, however, I've been burned before relying on on-board raid chipsets and not being able to get to the data after a mobo failure.

What makes you think an add-in card will be any different?

The RAID5 solution is attractive because it's a "set and forget" solution - will safeguard my data unless I have a power surge or something along those lines in which case nothing but an offline backup would suffice.

So's a scheduled copy.

Look, if you can afford 1200 CDs, you can afford a 3Ware card, or even an Areca card (better at RAID 5). Personally, I think RAID 5 is the work of the Devil, but if your heart is set on it, just do it.

BTW, I agree with Mercutio. How's the self-flagellation going, anyway?

 

[egd]

Can I say that I think you're looking at the wrong solution?

I'd suggest finding three Sony ES CD Jukeboxes....Ripping 1200 CDs doesn't sound like any fun at all. It kind of sounds like punishment for something.

Your point is noted, however, I'm going to be driving the music library using Squeezebox 2 - http://www.slimdevices.com/ , which makes ripping CDs a necessity. Whilst it is monotonous, with a fast PC, EAC and an Internet connection, it is quite painless - just throw in a CD whenever you walk by and let the machine do its thing. It will take some time but I don't plan on sitting in front of my PCs all day ripping audio.

 

[egd]

What makes you think an add-in card will be any different?

Based on my experience I figure add-in RAID cards are usually easier to source than replacement mobos with the same chipsets as an earlier mobo

Personally, I think RAID 5 is the work of the Devil...

Could you explain your reasoning - if I'm going down an unsuitable path then now is the time for me to find out...

 

[time]

BAARF

 

[egd]

BAARF

ACK! Understood :eekers:

 

[sechs]

I'm going to be driving the music library using Squeezebox 2 - http://www.slimdevices.com/ , which makes ripping CDs a necessity.

Heard of a CD changer?

 

[egd]

Heard of a CD changer?

Aah, but you miss the point, the possibilities and playlists are endless. If you're a music lover you'd understand. Besides, CDs are going the way of the dinosaur, it's just a matter of time...

 

[Tannin]

EGD, you are running into a fixed and set-in-concrete mindset here: several of the posters above are just about 100% dead-set against RAID of (almost) any kind, and for (almost) any purpose. You will quite likely never get sensible help with setting up your RAID system from those guys, just off-the-cuff comments about how pointless RAID is.

But those guys didn't get the way they are by accident. They got to despise RAID because the computer world is absolutely chock-full of half-educated half-wits (most of them 14-17 years old) who walk around preaching the Holy Gospel of RAID: if you don't RAID your system (according to the moronic teeny tweakers) you are a hopeless incompetent not fit to format a floppy disc. RAID, they tell us at every opportunity, will triple your Quake frame rates, cure baldness, and substantially increase the size of your unmentionable member.

So who is right? The teeny tweakers? Or the hardened cynics who have posted their views above? They can't both be right: their positions are 20 kilometres apart.

In reality, of course, the answer is somewhere inbetween the two camps. To be more precise the truth lies roughly 2 centimetres away from the "RAID is a bad joke" camp, and 19.999998 kilometres from the Holy Gospel of RAID camp.

RAID doesn't improve performance (except DTR, which is a non-issue in your application).

In most cases, RAID doesn't improve data security either. Sure, you can recover the data from a single lost drive, but only if it is a single drive, and only if the cause of the problem is a hardware failure which (for some reason) has impacted on that single drive and no other. RAID doesn't do SFA for any other sort of failure. It is, in other words, useless against around 90 to 95% of the possible causes of data loss. Add in to that the fact that the complexities and general weirdness of the RAID setup itself add extra risk and you are right back where you started - i.e., with much the same overall data security as you had when you had one less drive and no RAID controller. Extra money, extra complexity, no actual benefit.

For the price of a RAID controller you can buy an extra drive or (depending on the controller you use) a sack full of spare drives. The ONLY backup methods worth talking about are off-line.

Let's say you need 800GB. You have 4 x 200GB drives. What is the cheapest effective way to secure that data? Simple: very simple - another 4 200GB drives that are not plugged into the system under normal circumstances. Probably cheaper than RAID, and vastly more secure. We are not talking about a small percentage better here, we are looking at something like 10 to 100 times more secure for added cost that, in the scheme of things, is trivial.

By the way: remember that the physical failure rate of different drives varies a great deal. Samsung are the best, but last time I looked their biggest was 250GB. Even so, they are very cheap, so you could just use extra drives. That's probably the best answer. If you really need 400GB units, I guess you'd better go Hitachi. I certainly wouldn't be using Western Digital for a job like that, and I'd avoid Seagate/Maxtor if possible. Samsung if you can, Hitachi if you need to.

 

[Mercutio]

So? Making playlists against that volume of music is a genuinely tedious thing to do.

Are you planning to listen to this music outside your home? Are you sure slimserver is secure? Planning to open up a port on your firewall?

Personally, I use 3x 400 disc Sony ES changers for CDs, and 3x changers for DVDs. When I lived in a house, I had A/V distribution over cat5. Now I don't really bother. I just leave everything in my living room. I have an Escient Fireball system for management... but even if I didn't, a hobbyist programmer could make a software interface to RS232 pretty easily, and I'll bet you can even find some java or vb or C++ code snippets to get a program to talk to a CDDB. Finally, I have a nice, handy radio frequency remote if I need to turn my music on or off while I'm in some other room.

Mainly, though, I think electronic formats for music are kind of stupid. You'll get screwed at some future time when you can't find something to convert FLAC to $DRM-laden-format$ that will be the only format supported by next-generation software. I think the headache of properly backing up and maintaining data integrity for your hundreds of gigabytes of files is going to be difficult (especially when you realize that you have to wait five hours for your RAID5 to resync because, oh, I don't know, a butterfly in Mexico farted). Generally, most people want/expect high availability from their music players, and data files may or may not be able to provide that.

A couple months ago, I had an NTFS error hose an entire 1.2TB hardware RAID5 array. I literally spent two months recovering that data with specialized software, and I needed a second 1.2TB worth of drives to do it. Are you going to back these FLAC files up or are you going to need to keep your 1200 CDs around "just in case"?

Physical data formats like CDs, SACD and DVD-As aren't likely to experience data loss. They go in their changer and stay there. You get the full sound the engineer intended you to have, in as many channels as you are supposed to have. You can play those discs in lots of players (I'll bet there are more component players that can handle SACD than there are portables that can handle FLAC). The media is actually yours, and it doesn't need backup or management, and there are already great solutions for dealing with lots and lots of them at once.

 

[Mercutio]

The hilarity that ensued when I needed to recover 1.2TB of a Hardware RAID5.

Look at all the fun I had!

 

[egd]

The hilarity that ensued when I needed to recover 1.2TB of a Hardware RAID5.

Look at all the fun I had!

Ok, I understand where you're coming from. What would you suggest I do to get the offline drives online on occasion to facilitate a backup? Is there some sort of housing I could purchase to hook them up via as the idea of opening a case periodically to unhook other drives, cable drives for backup, remove them, recable and reseat existing drives etc. does nothing for my appetite. If I could keep 4x400GB drives in a cage of sortts ready to plug and play for backups I'd happily do it.

 

[Tannin]

Good question, EGD! An old-fashioned external SCSI enclosure would work perfectly - and cost you an absolute fortune for the enclosure itself, never mind the drives. Scratch that theory.

You could use individual USB 2 or Firewire enclosures. Scratch that one too: far too messy with so many different bits and cables, and they each cost around 50% of the cost of a 400MB drive. Nope.

If it were me, I'd take a spare lying-around computer (anything would do - a K6-2/500 or something like that would be fine), add an extra controller card for the drives, and a network card; then only fire it up when I wanted to refresh the backup set. (Easy for me because I have plenty of space and any number of old computers handy. Only things I'd have to buy would be: (a) an add-in PCI controller card (SATA or whatever), (b) a network card, and, optionally, (c) a US$30 KVM so that I wouldn't need to give it a keyboard, mouse, or monitor. Load Linux or W2k (or anything) on it, span the drives into a single volume, away you go. This may or may not be a suitable solution for you.

How about a dedicated network storage box? I'm not sure how much they cost, but there was a thread about them here just the other day. If the price is sensible, this would be ideal. Neat, tidy, probably quite portable too. But maybe the price is out of court. Who knows about this stuff? Merc?

There are probably products around designed for just this sort of job that can plug right into a single external SATA cable. Haven't seen any, but it would make sense. Present the SATA system with what looks like a single SATA drive of arbitary capacity (depending on how many 400GB drives you put in the box), plug in and go. Don't know if anybody makes this kind of thing though.

 

[Fushigi]

Of course, most of being said here is WRT consumer-grade RAID controllers. Enterprise-class RAID5 is fine and has been for many years. But it ain't cheap. I'm specing 5TB of RAID5 disk for a server at work. My discounted price is $126K for everything - drives, controllers, chassis w/backplane & optical chassis interconnects (& a few PCI-X slots). Thats for 36 140GB 15K U320 drives with 3 IBM 2780 RAID cards (each with 1GB read and 757MB write cache). Not cheap, but they're damn fast and there's no downtime - just a slight performance degradation - to rebuild the data onto a replacement drive should a drive fail.

Now, since this is RAID5, yes, we could get knocked down if we have more than one drive fail at the same time. But such events are exceedingly rare. Rare enough that when it does happen it's usually not the drives but the backplane or some other chassis component. Rare enough that we use RAID5 to support globally deployed apps that have to maintain 24x7 uptime.

Bringing this back to the realm of affordability to people like us, I suggest the following for backing up non-protected disks used for storing ripped media:
1. Do nothing. Catalog what CDs/DVDs are on which drives as you rip them. If a drive fails, replace it and re-rip. Pro: Cheap. Con: Time consuming if/when you have to rebuild.
2. Internal removable drive enclosure. Whenever you feel the need, plug in the removable drive, copy to it, unplug. Pro: Fast backups. Con: 1-for1 drive ratio means you'll wind up buying twice as many HDs as you need (same as doing mirroring).
3. External USB/Firewire drive(s). Basically the same as 2. Additional con: Extra cost for external drives and/or enclosures.
4. Go back to optical. Put a DVD burner in the machine and whenever you get 4-8GB (single- or dual-layer), pause & burn it to DVD. Pro: Cheap, expandable (buy more media), faster retore than 1, can fit many CDs onto a single DVD, easy to do incremental backups, can organize burned media by artist/genre if desired. Con: Slower than direct-to-HD backup, should test burned media annually to ensure it can still be read.
5. Back up over a network to another PC or home NAS device. Pro: Pretty fast. Con: More hardware to manage, if the PC/NAS is used for other things, there is risk of those drives failing as well, expense.
6. Tape drive. Pro: Easy restores. Con: Not priced for the home market.

The thing is, once you rip the music you won't be altering it. So doing full backups every week or month is not necessary. Incrementals are fine. If budget is the overriding concern, 1 is your best bet. Otherwise, I'd say do 4. With 2 & 3, you'd never know if the drive sitting on the shelf will power up when you need it. 5 involves a more elaborate setup and assuming the extra PC or NAS will be online for other uses brings with it higher operating costs (power, heat/impact on air conditioning) plus will cost a fair bit more to get set up.

 

[Pradeep]

There are probably products around designed for just this sort of job that can plug right into a single external SATA cable. Haven't seen any, but it would make sense. Present the SATA system with what looks like a single SATA drive of arbitary capacity (depending on how many 400GB drives you put in the box), plug in and go. Don't know if anybody makes this kind of thing though.

This doesn't use a single plug, but it's pretty easy to hook up via 5 SATA cables.

http://supermicro.com/products/accessories/mobilerack/CSE-M35T-1.cfm

 

[Santilli]

I combine the above ideas, using Raid 0 to boot from, and removeable drives for storage.

Buy LSI single channel RAID card, 350. Cable will be included with Supermicro SCA SCSI gem 318 removeable drive box. Find refurbished drives, prefer SCSI 10k Cheetahs, in the 146 gig category. Computer Giant has them, often, and for close to the same price as ATA. So does
www.hypermicro.com, best to call him, and see what he has around.

Plug drive in, copy data to drive, and pull drive out. I do not hot swap, though they say you can.

A cheaper version, and less problems, would be to take a single channel SCSI 320 LSI card, 100 dollars or less, and use the same box. Termination is included in the SCA box.

I've found SCSI drives that have been refurbished either work, for a very long time, or die right off.

Also, in moving from one scsi card, Adaptec 21010S, which is still in the machine, and dog slow, to the LSI, that the data on the drives was not readable, this on the single drives used for storage, until formatted and assigned by the LSI card.

I don't know if this was a problem that happens all the time, but, I thought I would be able to plug any scsi card into the SCA box, and be able to read the single drives. I was wrong.

Don't know if this is common, but, it wouldn't shock me if this was an Adaptec only thing.

GS

 

[Sol]

Is there anything particularly problematic about just having a stack on un-raided drives with all your music on them?
I'm fairly sure your jukebox app won't care and it's not like you'll be wasting a huge ammount of space because one FLAC file of even one album won't fit on a particular drive. The problem is that there are a lot not that they're really huge.
Hard drives, especially good hard drives, don't fail that often, and as painful as reencoding your entire music collection would be, encoding one hard drive full doesn't seem like it would be that bad. You could eliminate the need for any backup, or at least any major backup scheme and adding an extra drive would be a much less expensive (and time consuming and risky) endevour. Additionally you could just use whatever hard drives represent the best $/GB ratio right now rather than shelling out a premium for something with some futureproofing knowing that it doesn't matter what size you choose to add later...

Of course all this comes from someone who built a raid 0 array because he was too lazy to maintain a system similar to the one described... But then again your system seems a lot more static than my own, and I don't care if I lose all my data.