I am new to Unraid, up until now I have used a Drobo 5D but decided to move to a system that I had more control over when a drive fails i.e. improve my chances of actually getting the data back.
To get me going I bought a secondhand system on ebay which has :
Supermicro H8DAE motherboard (2 x 2.4GHz dual core, 32GB ECC RAM, Onboard IDE only, 2 x 133MHz PCI-X 64bit slots, 2 x 66MHz 64bit PCI-X slots)
2 x Supermicro SAT2-MV8 PCI-X controller 133MHz PCI-X 64 bit, capable of handling 8 x Sata II each
15 SATA bay case
I also have the following drives to go in :
1 x 6TB Hitachi 7200rpm Sata III
10 x 2TB Hitachi 7200rpm Sata III
5 x 4TB Seagate 5400 rpm Sata III (extracted from USB external drives)
2 x 250 GB Samsung EVO SSD drives
I have a couple of general questions that I would appreciate any thoughts on:
(1) I plan on using the 6TB drive as the Party drive, should I connect it to one of the SATA ports on either of the current SAT2-MV8 boards or should I install a third SAT2-MV8 specifically for the Parity drive. the issue I immediately see with adding a third SAT2-MV8 is that it will have to go on a 66MHz PCI-X slot because the two 133MHx slots are already in use but I am thinking that perhaps that is preferable to having the Parity drive share the PCI-X bus with the data drives.
(2) Should I alternate the 5400rpm and 7200 rpm drives across the two SAT2-MV8 cards or put all 5400RPM on one SAT2-MV8
(3) Is it worth fitting the SSD's as a cache pool i.e. with my board and cards am I likely to get the write benefit of SSD.
(4) I have more drives than connection points (16 SATA 2 connection points but 18 Drives). I have 30TB of data at the moment and it is growing about 100GB per day. Which drives should I abandon ? or should I go for the third (slower 66MHz) PCI-X SAT2-MV8 and add more drive bays ? or look at a second Unraid
(5) I have 3 x 8TB seagate archive drives. These are explicity banned from use on the Drobo so I'm using them as a second layer backup. Should I perhaps consider incorporating them into the Unraid system ?
I have read the FAQ and Manuals but its taking a while to absorb so I thought I would ask for some initial guidance to get me started
Many thanks in advance
Steve