Help - recommendation for 16-24 bay

[r4ptor]

I'm building a new NAS and its going to have 16 or 24 drives, but i cant decide on the components, which is why i could use some recommendations.

Primarily its going to be a NAS, but I also want plex on it with 1-3 streams.

 

What i have laying around is a supermicro X11SSH-LN4F motherboard with a i3-6300T cpu, a 500w psu and a 24 bay narco case (which i might sell for one with fewer bays).

The motherboard has a free pci-e 3.0 x8 slot for a HBA card, the rest is going to be occupied by a nvm cache ssd and a dual sfp+ nic.

 

So how am I going to put this server together with a controller without a bottleneck?

 

1. The controller LSI SAS 9305-24i is expensive ($500-600) but its simple plug and play, enough ports for all drives and utilize x8 pci-e 3.0.

2. On the other hand, the LSI SAS 9201-16i is cheap but has only 16 ports (im fine with that) but can it handle drives over 4TB and max the speed of the drives?

3. If I went with the 9201-16i and added a Intel RES2SV240, can it handle 24 drives with max performance?

[JorgeB]

7 minutes ago, r4ptor said:

If I went with the 9201-16i and added a Intel RES2SV240, can it handle 24 drives with max performance?

You'd still have a decent speed but would be limited by the PCIe 2.0 bus, maximum speed of or below 125MB/s during parity checks, rebuilds, etc.

[r4ptor]

1 minute ago, johnnie.black said:

You'd still have a decent speed but would be limited by the PCIe 2.0 bus, maximum speed of or below 125MB/s during parity checks, rebuilds, etc.

Thanks for the fast reply.
So it would be better to ignore the expander and simply use 16 drives directly to the 9201-16i. I should then get 4000/16=250MB/s per drive then?

[JorgeB]

More like 3000/16 due to PCIe overhead, but still enough for most disks.

 

You can check this thread for various controller and expander real world speed tests.

[r4ptor]

Thats awsome.

But if im useing the 9201-16i  the speed would be 3000/16=187,5MB/s but if I went with the 9207-i8 and a RES2SV240 useing dual link the speed i got would be 275MB/s. Could that really be the case? both use pci-e 2.0 and x8.

[JorgeB]

11 minutes ago, r4ptor said:

9207-i8

is PCIe 3.0

[r4ptor]

25 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

is PCIe 3.0

Your right, i miss read that.

 

If you want to max performance of your discs but still on a budget, a 9207-8i with a RES2SV240 seems to be the way to go.

 

I noticed that the 9300-8i is evenly matched in price, would that give even better performance then the 9207-8?

 

Also, what is the pci-e port on the  RES2SV240 for? power maybe but cant you power it from the molex on top instead?

[JorgeB]

13 minutes ago, r4ptor said:

I noticed that the 9300-8i is evenly matched in price, would that give even better performance then the 9207-8?

Same with SATA disks, it would be faster with SAS3 SSDs (with a SAS3 expander).

 

13 minutes ago, r4ptor said:

Also, what is the pci-e port on the  RES2SV240 for? power maybe but cant you power it from the molex on top instead?

Yes, it can be powered by either one.

Edited June 27, 2018 by johnnie.black