Hello!
As a budget NAS build, I would like to use some spare parts I have left at home, among which there’s a motherboard with only 2 SATA III ports (out of 4 where the other two should be 3Gbit/s) and a PCIe 16x slot.
Is Rockstor somehow compatible with PCIe SATA controllers, so that I could chain more than 2 Disks in my setup?
Consider that I would like to do a RAID0, involving 4 disks for storage pool(2 from the internal SATA III ports and 2 from the PCIe card), 1 small ssd to install OS upon (which can use one of the two 3Gbit/s
ports without any problem) and 1 small ssd as cache disk (which can use the last of the two 3Gbit/s internal ports).
Is this a viable solution and, in that case, what PCIe card would you reccomend?
I don’t need High-end performance as the whole build is pretty cheap and the main purpose of the NAS device will be to store data for archive (mostly roms for retrogaming, their artwork, ISOs, documents). Basically no media-streaming, and nothing fancy to work on in real time, like audio sequencing or 2D-3D editing, database etc.
Cool! I’ve done exactly what you suggest. Rockstor is a Rockstar in supporting everything hardware wise that’s been thrown at it so far. Single and multiple HBA’s 8 & 16 port or simple 2 port Sata III PCIe cards work fine!
I suppose OpenSUSE kernal is the the major star here, but Rockstor is built on it!
PS: I would suggest a brand name (LOL) Sata3 PCIe card and use good cables. I get those on Newegg.com and Amazon.com. I think the last 2-port Sata card I bought was like this one:
do these PCIe cards support RAID? I am not sure that every PCIe SATA expander do support RAID and I would like to be sure about that. Glad to hear that my idea is a viable solution, thou! Thanks for the reply!
Sorry for jumping in; I just wanted to clarify an important detail… my apologies if I misunderstood your previous message.
Note that we strongly recommend against using hardware raid with Rockstor as this would weaken the overall situation. Indeed, to benefit from Btrfs’ features, it needs access to the disks without an intermediary layer. Btrfs will manage the redundancy of data depending on the Btrfs raid profile you select, and give you all the extra features that go along with it. Please see our minimum at as tem requirements section of our docs as they briefly detail that point: https://rockstor.com/docs/installation/quickstart.html#minimum-system-requirements
Sorry for the brevity but I’m sure we’ll be able to answer in more details if you’d like.
And from me, I do not use nor do I recommend any Hardware Raid setup as well. BTRFS does it’s one really nice thing as regards Raid-0, Raid-1, Raid-10, Raid-1C3 etc. It is virtually as fast as it needs to be and has no problem saturating a 1G or 10G network port provided the drives can support that.
The Sata card I mentioned is not a controller, just a Sata port expanded. The HBA’s I use are all in IT mode with intrinsic raid functions disabled. They act as a fancy port expander. There is no need to create double trouble with double redundancy in either hardware or software. BTRFS by its very nature takes care of that. Besides the dual Sata port card above, I use these two inexpensive controllers (or HBA’s) with perfect success!
16 Port HBA I use:
8 port HBA I use:
These just work. Not only that, I recently removed the 8-port HBA from the main NAS and replaced it with a 16-port HBA as above, turned on the system and Rockstor ran perfectly like nothing had changed! Try that with some ZFS or Unraid or other NAS system!
They are set in IT mode and have breakout cables that go straight to standard Sata HD’s and SSD’s.
Looking at the LSI 9300 you will notice 4 cables with 4 Sata connections each. The LSI 9207 (or similar) uses a different connetor but has 2 cables with 4 Sata connections each.
An Ebay or Amazon search will show some cards that come with cables and some that don’t.
I think I will use a spare HP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF for my new DIY NAS Cheap Build project. All the components will be removed from the case and placed in a desk drawer, which I will adoperate to drill on the back of the furniture piece, to have an 80 or 120 exhaust low noise fan. The specs of the basic machine are here → HP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF vs. HP ProDesk 600 G4 SFF Comparison
I thought about going with 2 of the smallest nvme ssd as possible (one for the OS and one for the Cachedisk) and then attaching 2 HDD, or SSD to the 2 of 3 SATA ports for data storage, making a RAID1 (I misstyped in my first post, since I meant RAID1, for mirroring purposes). Or maybe I could opt to attach 3 disks and have a RAID5 configuration. In that case I would not need a SATA expander, thanks to those 2 Nvme slots. What do you think?
you could also explore RAID1c3 setup instead. RAID5/6 I would consider, if your primarily archiving stuff and don’t have a lot of continuous and extended writes to the disks (or have a UPS attached to it).
Here for reference (not that Rockstor supports every single possible permutation out of the box, but the majority of them):
