SAS card and HDD recommendations?

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TechMonkey

New Member
Sep 22, 2019
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Hello everyone. I acquired a dell t7500 that is loaded with 2 quad core xeons and ecc memory. I'm going to start using it as my primary server in the home and basically consolidate all my raspberry pi's and VPS's to this single machine.

I am looking for the "right:" hardware to do the job for the HDD setup. I know this is probably basic, but this is my first foray into doing it "right" with enterprise quality gear. here is the machine if you are interested in how it was configured from dell.


So the questions.
  • Can I get a 12gb/s Sas HBA that will work on pcie gen 2?
  • do i need a card with battery backup on board?
  • how do I handle raid? In the HBA? (I plan on eventually moving to a disk shelf, but for now will be using internal HDD's)
  • any reason not to use exos 10TB drives?
  • other points I dont know/havent thought of?
I know ill have to upgrade this hardware at some point, But Im trying to build something I can grow into for the next couple years. The primary usage of the machine will be email and file hosting for my family. (about 20 people hitting it from all over the country)
 

Falloutboy

Member
Oct 23, 2011
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PCIe Generation and SAS generation will not affect your ability in the respect of question 1, I think you are actually asking if I run a 12Gb SAS HBA will PCIe Gen 2 provide enough bandwidth - is that the case?

I run a 9361-8i with cachevault which uses a supercap, I would recommend this setup as it allows for write back operations which will provide extra performance.

on the 9361-8i the raid is handled by the HBA and there is a piece of management software available called Megaraid which provides a quirky but usable front end.

Note though the 9361-8i is not the cheapest of kit and you might want to go for something further down the spectrum, if in doubt just ask but to get an idea of pricing check out the cards on ebay , read up here and if you still don't know - ask.

O.K this is a yes and no answer yes you could use seagate exos 10Tb drives, but I would probably say you might find it will take a heck of a long time depending on the number of drives in your array to format it - depending on the raid type you choose , raid 6 for example you would need minimum four drives 2 data drives, two paraty drives and on top of that you will want a hot swap or global spare. Assuming that they will all be seen at once by the controller that means you will be formatting 40Tb across four drives and that every time it rolls around to a disk check for inconsistancies you will have five drives in the mix, this will take quite some time. ( trust me I know as I am running 32 4Tb drives )

It's all dependant on the amount of Chassis space you have for drives but I would recommend keeping to 4Tb drives if you can or you will be waiting an age, espescially if you ever have to do a rebuild.

Other points ....
In my humble opinion and limited experience - having only owned a Dell PS6100XV , Dell is HIGHLY proprietory, as an example this unit was only built to handle 600Gb SAS drives, it will never go beyond that size, in edition the drives had to have specific equallogic firmware on them and could only use dell equallogic drives on the system, even if they looked like a seagate drive in the chassis, the firmware not being dell spat the dummy.
Personally before laying out huge amounts of cash on these extras I would grab a couple of cheap low end identical drives, put them in the dell and raid them - that way at least you will know if dell has pulled any of that arsery in the system you have.

Short version, be sure what you've got will do the job with the hardware you have before you drop a tonne of cash.

Personally I brough a supermicro SAS backplane of eBay and have gutted the PS6100XV, I will put the Supermicro backplane on it and connect proper cabling back to the host and run a full on cable with a 12v relay board and a standard power supply to turn it on, with that I should be able to run pretty much anything. Ask the guys here they will quite happily do what they can, if you do need a recommendation for one of the SAS backplanes from SM ask and Ill pass on what they have taught me.

Good luck with your build :)
 

Falloutboy

Member
Oct 23, 2011
221
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I just had a quick look at the manual and noted...
"Hard Disk Drives The Dell Precision T5500 and T7500 systems offer a range of SATA hard drives up to 1.5TB7at 7,200 RPM and up to 300GB7 at 10,000 RPM. SAS 15K drives are available up to 450GB7. Hardware and host based RAID options can deliver increased I/O performance or enhanced reliability." note the digits after GB seem to refer to some form of note that was not there that I could see.
This looks like a LGA1366 system, do you know if the motherboard mounting layout is standard? if so you might want to consider something like an Supermicro X8DTH-6 and just ensure it has the LSI controller on board - this would also dependant again though on what raid level you want to run.
 

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
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The note 7 was probably telling you GB means a billion bytes, and TB means a trillion bytes.