I'm very new to this so I thought I'd ask the experts instead of throw money away.
I'm currently using a Z68 motherboard running Windows 10 as a NAS. It also runs my security camera software. I've run Xpenology and FreeNAS. Both are fine but the security camera stuff isn't available and driver support for 10G networking (w/Xpenology) is lacking.
I'm using the motherboard's Intel controller for a RAID 10 array, 4x 5TB disks. I'm topping out at about 370MBps read and write. While that's pretty good for write speed, it's about half what read speed should be with 4 drives. The drives are on SATA II ports but each drive can only read and write at around 175 MBps anyway - well below the SATA II limit of 3Gbps. Win-raid forums suggest that the Windows 10 driver is partly to blame as past versions (v11) had much higher speeds. I could go through the effort of re-packing the old driver into the Windows image and reinstall but I'm wondering if there is a better solution.
I'd also like to use a SSD cache for the spinny disks and this isn't possible with consumer gear.
So I was thinking of using something like this: Intel RS3DC040 PCI-Express 3.0 x8 Low Profile Ready SATA / SAS Controller Card - Newegg.com (Intel RS3DC040)
...but I'm an amateur at this stuff. I've read that these Intel controllers don't play nice with many motherboards. The LSI model numbers are confusing as hell. I still have to figure out a cabling solution that can hook up the 4 SATA HDDs and 2 SATA SSDs. I don't want a controller to find a bad sector and kick an entire disk out of the array like it might in a commercial environment. I'm kind of lost.
What would you recommend?
One last piece of info: the box itself is on a UPS but the data being stored on it isn't absolutely critical. I can deal with a power outage that wipes out a transfer. I'm more interested in speed.
I'm currently using a Z68 motherboard running Windows 10 as a NAS. It also runs my security camera software. I've run Xpenology and FreeNAS. Both are fine but the security camera stuff isn't available and driver support for 10G networking (w/Xpenology) is lacking.
I'm using the motherboard's Intel controller for a RAID 10 array, 4x 5TB disks. I'm topping out at about 370MBps read and write. While that's pretty good for write speed, it's about half what read speed should be with 4 drives. The drives are on SATA II ports but each drive can only read and write at around 175 MBps anyway - well below the SATA II limit of 3Gbps. Win-raid forums suggest that the Windows 10 driver is partly to blame as past versions (v11) had much higher speeds. I could go through the effort of re-packing the old driver into the Windows image and reinstall but I'm wondering if there is a better solution.
I'd also like to use a SSD cache for the spinny disks and this isn't possible with consumer gear.
So I was thinking of using something like this: Intel RS3DC040 PCI-Express 3.0 x8 Low Profile Ready SATA / SAS Controller Card - Newegg.com (Intel RS3DC040)
...but I'm an amateur at this stuff. I've read that these Intel controllers don't play nice with many motherboards. The LSI model numbers are confusing as hell. I still have to figure out a cabling solution that can hook up the 4 SATA HDDs and 2 SATA SSDs. I don't want a controller to find a bad sector and kick an entire disk out of the array like it might in a commercial environment. I'm kind of lost.
What would you recommend?
One last piece of info: the box itself is on a UPS but the data being stored on it isn't absolutely critical. I can deal with a power outage that wipes out a transfer. I'm more interested in speed.