[mythtv-users] Question re: available SATA ports and linux software RAID

[Robin Hill]

On Thu Apr 07, 2011 at 09:28:20AM +0100, Simon Hobson wrote:

> Bobby Gill wrote:
> >Going to be setting up a server soon, am pretty settled on RAID5 
> >linux software RAID. I currently have an ASUS P5K-E mobo that has 6 
> >SATA slots + 2 eSATA slots. I would be using 1 drive for my Arch OS, 
> >so that leaves 7 available slots for my array.
> >
> >My question is, what if I would wish to have a 8/10/12 drive array 
> >either right off the bat or in the future? Would getting one of 
> >these work: 
> >http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=16-101-358
> >
> 
> OK, I think there is some confusion there.
> 
> The Supermicro card you link to is a SAS RAID card - and using it's 
> inbuilt RAID controller will only do the drives connected directly to 
> it. It's overkill because if you are doing software RAID then you 
> won't be using any of the on-card facilities.
> 
True, but you don't seem to be able to get plain SATA controllers with
more than 4 ports (and most have just 2), so I can see the appeal of
these.

> For large storage, you may find this article an interesting read :
> http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
> 
> I suspect some of the comments about choice of host adapters are out 
> of date, but it does give you an insight into some of the issues 
> involved.
> 
If you just want bulk storage, then that's a very good solution. The
performance will not be great though - 16 drives on a 1x PCI-e slot,
where 2 will saturate the bandwidth. Of course, for a household mythtv
setup then this should be no issue (though you'd need to give some
thought as to how the drives are allocated to arrays).

Cheers,
    Robin

-- 
     ___        
    ( ' }     |       Robin Hill        <myth at robinhill.me.uk>  |
   / / )      | Little Jim says ....                            |
  // !!       |      "He fallen in de water !!"                 |
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20110407/53f725e3/attachment.bin