The spec:
4 x 12tb SAS Exos12
HPE P840 4gb Raid Controller
State:
All caching disabled, physical and controller.
Pool is RAID0 with a strip size of 256k (1MB stripe).
OS is Windows 2019 Server.
Filesytem is ReFS at 64kb.
Not bad raw-uncached throughput for just 4 drives, this pool is entirely for large (2gb+) raw video footage archiving.
Once I enable caching plus Smartcache (2 SAS SSD RAID0), my use-case kicks into well and truly served mode, ie. raw footage scrubbing in NLE timeline at virtually no-latency. The old smartcache/cachecade tech still has a use-case indeed.
Once you enable all the caching, things go insane, though I wouldn't read into the above as anything substantial, it just gives an idea of what happens when working on raw cached data. The server itself has a huge chunk of free ram for OS to cache files too (Windows Server is pretty good for that), along with the 100G RDMA link to client, things fly no different to as if you were working off a local NVME drive and with very little to negligible effect on cpu cycles. Indeed one can achieve greater throughput with more elaborate costly configurations, but for the cost of a night out on the town of fine-dining-and-wining (pre-lockdown era), these results more than serve this old man's use-case.
Backup wise, all data is kept in sync on a different rack server with a non-raid controller and a bunch of HDDs' under ZFS on a 3 day sync (other smaller pools are SSD RAID10 with daily backups), along with a monthly LTO7 archive job.
Once you have the tape setup, you kind of ignore all the worries of data-loss and play with fire like you have superpowers. Obviously this set-up isn't ideal for zero-downtime environments, but for many homelab'ers where a fat bank-balance is a priority and a bonus with the missis, it works, great at that too.
4 x 12tb SAS Exos12
HPE P840 4gb Raid Controller
State:
All caching disabled, physical and controller.
Pool is RAID0 with a strip size of 256k (1MB stripe).
OS is Windows 2019 Server.
Filesytem is ReFS at 64kb.
Not bad raw-uncached throughput for just 4 drives, this pool is entirely for large (2gb+) raw video footage archiving.
Once I enable caching plus Smartcache (2 SAS SSD RAID0), my use-case kicks into well and truly served mode, ie. raw footage scrubbing in NLE timeline at virtually no-latency. The old smartcache/cachecade tech still has a use-case indeed.
Once you enable all the caching, things go insane, though I wouldn't read into the above as anything substantial, it just gives an idea of what happens when working on raw cached data. The server itself has a huge chunk of free ram for OS to cache files too (Windows Server is pretty good for that), along with the 100G RDMA link to client, things fly no different to as if you were working off a local NVME drive and with very little to negligible effect on cpu cycles. Indeed one can achieve greater throughput with more elaborate costly configurations, but for the cost of a night out on the town of fine-dining-and-wining (pre-lockdown era), these results more than serve this old man's use-case.
Backup wise, all data is kept in sync on a different rack server with a non-raid controller and a bunch of HDDs' under ZFS on a 3 day sync (other smaller pools are SSD RAID10 with daily backups), along with a monthly LTO7 archive job.
Once you have the tape setup, you kind of ignore all the worries of data-loss and play with fire like you have superpowers. Obviously this set-up isn't ideal for zero-downtime environments, but for many homelab'ers where a fat bank-balance is a priority and a bonus with the missis, it works, great at that too.
