what would give better performance?

[bilbo6209]

I am trying to build my unraid "the right" way... I had my old one built with 2 PSU's 6 drives in random cages outside the case etc so I am working on building my new server "right"

 

Currently I have the hardware listed in my sig, but I am looking to at least 3 VMs (on my cache drives) and want to make sure I am going to get the best performance out of it.

 

If I have a Promise TX4310 SATA 2 raid card( it supports JBOD 0,1,5, and 10) and 4 1tb drives.... what would be my best set up with these drives and card for my cache? I was thinking of letting the card handle the RAID (it is a hardware RAID card) and do either a RAID 5 or a RAID 10 (5 would be a bit slower but would only loose 1 drive to Parity vs 2 if I do a RAID 10). My other though would be to run the card in JBOD mode and let UnRaid handle the 4 drives in a cache pool.... 

 

What do you think?

[bilbo6209]

sorry I just saw I posted this in Defects Sorry, I can repost in general

[garycase]

You do NOT want to use a PCI card like the Promise ... the PCI bus is a MAJOR bottleneck in performance for modern drives.    Even the PCIe x1 SYBA card is marginal if you're planning to use SSDs for the cache.

 

I'd buy a good PCIe x4 card for the x4 slot on your motherboard, and use it for all drives beyond the 6 onboard SATA ports you have.

 

 

 

[garycase]

sorry I just saw I posted this in Defects Sorry, I can repost in general

 

Taken care of -- I moved it to the General area.

 

[bilbo6209]

Shoot! I looked at the card earlier (I didn't pull it because my DC is currently running on it) but I thought it was a PCI-e card

 

OK assuming I get a 4 or 6 port SATA 3 PCI-e card.... what config would I be better using for the cache drives? RAID 5, RAID 10, or JOBD and letting UnRaid build a cache pool?

 

Bill

[garycase]

I'd just let UnRAID build a cache pool.

 

[bilbo6209]

Hmmm.. Can I mix ssd and non ssd drives in the cache? Ideally I would want to run dockers and VM OS off ssd but have current 1tb spindle drive as 2nd cache and data drive for at least one vm, for non critical data.

 

 

[garycase]

I don't use a cache, but v6 shows support for both HDD and SSD, so I'm fairly sure there's no problem mixing the two.  Clearly the larger spindled drive won't be fault tolerant (unless you have 2 of them).

 

Note, however, that if you're using a spindled drive for your apps/VMs there's really no need for an SSD as the data cache => when you write to the array the network is going to be the limiting factor, so a rotating drive is plenty fast enough (at least any modern drive with high areal density is).

 

[bilbo6209]

That was kind of my thought on ssd drives too.... But Im still torn,  I wasn't sure I would really see a huge difference. But if I'm running 3 VMs on a couple dockers (xbmc database and maybe one or two more)  off the cache drives ssd drives would really speed up that performance even if it didn't speed up traditional cache usage.

 

I will be running,  1 very lightly used domain controller (5 or 6 clients, print server, local DNS, and maybe dhcp), one torrent box, and one always Steam streaming system (this will have the majority of ram, gpu and sound card).

 

 

[garycase]

SSD's are very inexpensive these days => you can get 500GB units for under $200, and even 1TB for ~ $350 if you watch the sales.    The Crucial MX200 series are excellent values, and are often discounted to those levels.