Any suggestions on Raid6/RAID60 controllers for use with Seagate 14TB Exos Drives (ST14000NM0018)?

[NoProblemAtoll]

Any suggestions on Raid6 / RAID60 RAID controllers (with battery back cache) for use with Seagate 14TB HDD Exos X14 SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 3.5-Inch Enterprise Hard Drives (ST14000NM0018)? I will be storing mostly media files with sizes ranging from 150 MB to 5GB.

I just ordered (8)x of these Seagate 14TB drives to replace an older RAID60 I build years ago and is almost filled up with media files. I am not familiar with ZFS so was planning to go Raid again but doubt my older RAID cards are well suited for 14TB drives. I am looking to start with RAID6 (7)x Drives with an additional Hot Spare for 63.7 TB usable. I also want to make sure the controller also supports RAID60 so that I would be able to to grow the array eventually to up to (22)x 14TB Drives in a RAID60 with (2)x additional Hot spares which would yield a 229.2TB usable array size.

 

[i386]

I'm not sure if the broadcom or adaptec controllers can change the raid level from 6 to 60...

What raid cards do you have?
Budget?
Backplane/chassis?
Do you need ssd caching (cachecade/maxcache)?

 

[NoProblemAtoll]

- The current models of RAID cards I have are Dell Perc H700, MR9265-8i, and Dell PERC H730P coupled with Intel RES2SV240NC SAS Expander Cards.
- Budget would be $150 to $500. (After encountering firmwares rejecting good drives from arrays and lost the data partitions I will spend what I need to for achieve stability and performance.)
- For my larger arrays, I have (2)x Supermicro 846 4u 24-bay chassis with BPN-SAS-846TQ passthrough backplanes with no onboard expanders. While I am at (8) drives, the (8)x 14TB could fit into a standard Phanteks PC case though and may be what they start in.
- Do you need ssd caching (cachecade/maxcache)? I don't know... That isn't a feature that I have leveraged thus far however if it is going to increase stability or performance that may be something I want to consider.

The storage is going to be consumed primarily by media files (150mb to 5GBs) with a lot of writes and less reads. I understand enough about storage to know what I don't know anymore. My experience and working knowledge is with hardware several generations back. While I have some frame of reference to draw from having worked in Datacenters with Storage and Hardware (RAID, DAS, SAN, Storage Shelves, etc) I moved to Leadership and Management 10 years ago within an organization that now runs 5 years behind the industry. Storage Architecture and Infrastructure has likely evolved a lot in years since I have been hands on and I concede I'm not going to be up on all the latest advances especially in relation to these large magnetic hard drives. After having rotten luck with all the 3TB or bigger drives that I had tried over the years (they all seems to die like 3 months after their warranty) I pretty much stayed with RAID'ing 1TB and 2TB drives that seems to far outlive their factory warranty. However the math and storage metrics are likely going to be vastly different on 14TB drives versus 2TB drive so I know to ask for input from others that have current knowledge of modern hardware. Like, if the Seagate Exos drives are no good I'd rather figure it out sooner versus later. Also if there are other considerations to take into account with array size, rebuild times, writeback caching, ssd caching, etc I would value any such insights.

 

[NoProblemAtoll]

Think I am going to try a Dell PERC H730 or Dell PERC H740.