Comment by j on "Looking for system upgrade advice, to SSD or not to SSD..."

hmm if you really use the storage for database access or gaming or things that need high throughput I would go for the SAS one.

else I would go for SATA and for the main 'hard disk' I would go for a SSD raid 1 with just 1 TB each.

And I would use a software raid because hardware raids with a raid controller take away the parity calculation from your cpu but still most of the articles and forums I raid mentioned that they sometimes fail in a way where your raid basically is worthless.

So I take the performance impact over the possible data loss.

Oh and since I am not sure what you want to achieve I didn't vote :)

That's the thing though, those 6tb Raid 1 are going to be HDD's... and if I'm going to have a RAID which can deliver similar if not faster reads, why bother with the SSD at all?

Note that first voting option is for an SSD and three HDD's (four drives in total). I couldn't word it to fit those three letters. (why the blazes are the voting title size limits so huffing short?!? 40 characters? REALLY?)

IDEALLY that should have been worded:

Option 1: 1TB SSD (boot) 2x 6TB HDD in RAID 1 (Network storage and business data) 12 TB HDD (media)

Option 2: 4x 6TB SATA HDD in RAID 5

Option 3: 4x 6TB SAS HDD in RAID 5

as to the use, I do describe what's already on the machine in question. It's a mixed bag of most everything really.

And I would use a software raid because hardware raids with a raid controller take away the parity calculation from your cpu but still most of the articles and forums I raid mentioned that they sometimes fail in a way where your raid basically is worthless.

Uhm, that's an advantage -- the calculation is consistent (at least these days) across platforms, and moving it off the CPU means it's not wasting CPU on it. Better performance and HIGHER reliabiltiy, not lower.

Since with the controller handling it things are fault tolerant, whilst one kernel panic / BSOD / crash different with the CPU / software raid solution and it's buggered.

I do think the SAS is right out, I can't justify the price of the controller... and cheap controllers don't have dedicated cache to actually give you any advantages over just letting the main board handle it via SATA even if you're at half the interface throughput.

Still have the weekend before I pull the trigger though -- but since I've got $900 to burn I'm thinking on maybe FIVE of the 6tb in RAID 5. Still has single drive fault tolerance, but delivers 4x the read speeds on drives that start out at half the speed of a SATA SSD.

Since at the rate my storage needs are growing, having 24tb available sounds about right for at least six or seven years. (the goal)

Jason Knight

Uhm, that's an advantage -- the calculation is consistent (at least these days) across platforms, and moving it off the CPU means it's not wasting CPU on it. Better performance and HIGHER reliabiltiy, not lower.

Well actually some admin forums specifically warn about hardware raids and how they break, not software though.

I have a NAS running on Arch which I built/selected more on the premise of electricity consumption / streaming as well as picking the hardisks on reliability not speed. I have multiple raid controllers in it but I still use a software raid, they don't support raid 11 cluster configurations.

4 atom cores to allow streaming, a dlna service for media and samba for the windows clients.

In my case streaming does not need more speed what is the worth of reading more then 1GB/s when the network interface only supports 1GB/s ? :)

But I think your first setup suggestion seems to be just fine :)

j 4 atom cores, which CPU out of curiosity? Sounds somewhat akin to my workstation -- a Celeron J1900, 2ghz 4 core -- chosen specifically because it's an 8 watt processor. Whole system peak power draw is something like 60 watts and most of that is the video card. (driving two 1920x1200 displays and a 2560x1440 display which combined suck three times the juice of the computer itself).

The stuff I do for development work does'nae warrant much more processor than that; also helping me "keep it real" in terms of knowing what NORMAL people have for systems. Far too often developers fall into the trap of building themselves ultra-high end "development" rigs then fail to account for that fact that while what they write is fast for THEM, 'tis oft agonizingly slow and bloated when it comes to the types of computers Joe Sixpack and Susie Sunshine own. (aka the $400 Walmart Black Friday special)

If I were to build a dedicated NAS I'd probably just grab another one of those boards for $60 -- it's not like I'm not knee deep in perfectly good cases and 350 to 500 watt PSU's. (No joke, I've got a half dozen working supplies just sitting here as spares/pulls)

Though my dumpster diving for systems doesn't help with that in terms of storage space. More so when now I'm pulling 1366 and 1156 rigs with 4 to 8 gigs of DDR2/DDR3 out of the electronics recycling now.

Laughably that's where my spare 4770k I experiment with on things like TIM and delidding came from, NiB, unopened near as I could tell, tossed into the recycle? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot people!!!

Jason Knight yes exactly :) that's the one and I picked it for similar reasons :). Basically do the watts per hour calculation with all the running harddisks :)

ark.intel.com/products/78867/Intel-Celeron-Proces…

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