On 9/15/23 19:37, gene heskett wrote:
On 9/15/23 20:12, David Christensen wrote:On 9/15/23 15:04, gene heskett wrote:On 9/15/23 17:35, David Christensen wrote:On 9/15/23 12:28, gene heskett wrote:I've just ordered some stuff to rebuild or expand my Raid setup. This 16 port sata-III pci-e card: <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09L184W57?smid=A2H818KAC5I4D1&ref_=chk_typ_imgToDp&th=1>along with a bigger drive cage, cables and such and some gigastone 2T drives to make a raid big enough to run amanda. And maybe put a new card in front of my 2T /home raid10.Is everything going into one chassis? Have you considered an external drive chassis?Got one of those coming too. Small possibility it will fit it the bottom of this huge and old tiger direct tower. Because the radiator for the 6 core i5 is too tall, it hasn't had a side cover on it in years. If not, theres a 3 3.5" cage at the bottom of the stack I can stuff with 2 SSD's per bay slot. A hidey place, front cover is solid, but cooling might be a problem. If worse comes to worse I could shoe-goo a 120x15 to the side of the cage.This is what I meant: https://www.pc-pitstop.com/16-bay-25inch-sas-sata-jbod-towerCall me cheap, my choice is diy assembly, SS stampings you put together, all drive brackets and a dozen cables and a 5 drive power splitter, $30.Less than 5% of the price of that nice looking box.
Fair enough.Searching the mailing list archive, it appears that you have an Asus PRIME Z370-A II motherboard (?):
https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime-z370-a-ii/ And, an Intel Core i5 processor (?). Which model?How many GB of OS and apps do you have? Home directory? Bulk data? Amanda backups? VM's? Other?
While researching this thread, I came across an HBA that may interest both of us:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09L3GLCL9
4x the bandwidth (3.94 GB/s), 8 more SATA ports (24 total), and $42.31
higher price ($117.30). I would prefer this card for the bandwidth
alone, and I never know when I might need those extra ports to
temporarily connect a bunch of disks from other machines.
If your goal is maximum capacity at minimum cost, HDD's have larger capacity, lower bandwidth, and lower cost per TB than SSD's -- per bay, per drive, and per port. Port multiplication makes sense with HDD's.
For file server and backup server roles, I use ZFS with HDD primary storage devices and full bandwidth HBA. Read performance, write performance, and capacity utilization can be improved with ZFS compression, read performance can be improved with an SSD cache vdev (virtual device; e.g. partition), and write performance can be improved with SSD intent log vdev (mirror of partitions). For the backup server role, capacity utilization can be improved with ZFS deduplication and an SSD dedup vdev (mirror of partitions).
Regardless of what you do with HBA's, I would connect the six SSD's to the six motherboard SATA III ports.
A fresh install of Debian stable or old-stable should solve the storage I/O stuttering problems you are experiencing. (That motherboard has dual M.2 ports. Installing Debian onto an M.2 PCIE 3.0 x4 SSD would be very nice.)
David