Hi All,

 

For my video storage i need to build a storage system.

 

I need 80TB storage total, but want to start with 4x 6TB to keep the cost low in the begin and place more disks if this needed to store more data.

It is very important for me to keep the risk of losing any data as minimal as possible.

 

The system setup that i am thinking about:

 

16x hotswap supermicro case

Supermicro X10SLL-F

Intel Xeon E3-1220 V3

16Gb ECC Memory

LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-16i

4x 6TB Disks

 

Can some one give me advices how i can realize my whishes with unRAID Server os.

 

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

 

Greetings.

You can expand very easy, just pop in a new drive and the array is expanded (unraid will "clean" the drive before it is accesible, takes some hours, but that happends in the background).

I suggest you use 6.2, since then you can have dual parity. Then you can loose 2 disks without any data loss.

The hardware you're considering is excellent => server class motherboard; ECC; and a Xeon class CPU.

 

I'd consider two changes:

 

(a)  A Xeon 1230 would provide 50% more "horsepower" at the same TDP.  It does cost more, but would provide a lot more "headroom" if you decide to implement a few VM's and/or Dockers.  It simply never hurts to have EXTRA power available.

 

(b)  I'd use 8TB drives instead of the 6TB drives you're considering.  The reason is simple:  You're buying a 16-bay case, so you're limited to 16 drives.  With 6TB drives, that means a max capacity of 84TB, assuming you have dual parity and either no cache drive or use 2.5" drives (likely SSDs) mounted internally.    With 8TB drives the same 14 data drive positions will provide 112TB of capacity => or you could use a couple slots for cache drives and still easily have more than your 80TB target.

 

The simple fact is that if your target capacity is 80TB today, by the time you get close to that it will almost certainly have increased to a larger number      I'd just bite the bullet and start off with the excellent 8TB WD Reds => buy 4 to start (16TB of capacity with dual parity) ... and then just add additional drives as your needs grow.

 

The 8TB Reds are VERY reliable drives with excellent performance.  They're helium-sealed units, which keeps the power consumption low and allows them to run notably cooler than air-filled drives.

 

And you absolutely want to use dual parity => that's the only way to ensure that you meet your goal of keeping "... the risk of losing any data as minimal as possible."

 

Of course you should still have backups of any important data => but dual parity makes the likelihood of data loss very low as long as you immediately replace any failed drive.

 

Super simple. Just grab one of the many 24 bay supermicro servers that comes with everything. Done for about 300 bucks. ebay sc846 and avoid the el1 backplane