I have a file server at home for archival purposes. I try to take advantage of cheap old hard drives to store my personal files, movies etc. Recently, I acquired a lot of 2TB SAS harddrives from EBay for less than $20 each so I am switching from SATA to SAS drives and I plan to use SAS for my archival setup as I expect cheap SAS drives flooding the market.
My current server is based on a custom build with 12 hot swappable bays and I am using adaptec asr-51245. I am using Windows Server 2016 and storage spaces. This card worked great for me as it allows me to cover all 12 internal ports and I took advantage of the external port to add 4 more disks as cold back up of the data. Internally I did a combination of Soft and hardware RAID 0 for optimal transfer speeds. Overall system works great for me and I have the data redundant in 2 places.
But after reading that, RAID cards are trouble since when they fail, you need to find a compatible raid card to recover your data. This makes the raid card single point of failure and it makes me worried. I thought all RAID 0 setups are universal and all cards recognize an RAID0 array. For all those years , I have never had a failed RAID card but implications would be very bad. Should I worry about RAID card failure and switch to HBA SAS card? Now Adaptec 51245 is ubiquitous so it should not be so hard to find a replacement or I can buy one and keep aside. I am not sure what the best affordable option is.
What I am currently considering is buying an LSI-9201-16E as they are very affordable at $20 and add it as a second card so that in case of failure, I can use the external array of 8 drives for back up. I wonder if there are better options. The second card will take the last available slot on my mATX motherboard. Do I need good airflow for this card as my case is pretty cramped and there will not a direct fan blowing to the card?
I am also looking into getting HP P812 card. This card looks like an amazing value at 24 SAS2 port under $20 but it looks like you cannot disable the RAID mode.
Any suggestions?
My current server is based on a custom build with 12 hot swappable bays and I am using adaptec asr-51245. I am using Windows Server 2016 and storage spaces. This card worked great for me as it allows me to cover all 12 internal ports and I took advantage of the external port to add 4 more disks as cold back up of the data. Internally I did a combination of Soft and hardware RAID 0 for optimal transfer speeds. Overall system works great for me and I have the data redundant in 2 places.
But after reading that, RAID cards are trouble since when they fail, you need to find a compatible raid card to recover your data. This makes the raid card single point of failure and it makes me worried. I thought all RAID 0 setups are universal and all cards recognize an RAID0 array. For all those years , I have never had a failed RAID card but implications would be very bad. Should I worry about RAID card failure and switch to HBA SAS card? Now Adaptec 51245 is ubiquitous so it should not be so hard to find a replacement or I can buy one and keep aside. I am not sure what the best affordable option is.
What I am currently considering is buying an LSI-9201-16E as they are very affordable at $20 and add it as a second card so that in case of failure, I can use the external array of 8 drives for back up. I wonder if there are better options. The second card will take the last available slot on my mATX motherboard. Do I need good airflow for this card as my case is pretty cramped and there will not a direct fan blowing to the card?
I am also looking into getting HP P812 card. This card looks like an amazing value at 24 SAS2 port under $20 but it looks like you cannot disable the RAID mode.
Any suggestions?
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