Connecting 24 Hard Drives to a Single NAS

[jgreco]

What really knackers your disk I/O in a 24-drive system is that the processor and system board are generally unable to drive all ports at speed, unless you've specifically chosen a server-grade chipset and processors that will be able to keep up with such a load.

Since my very first words along this PM discussion thread were "If you don't need the ultimate in performance, look towards SATA port multipliers", it seems that you actually agree with me. I'm considering this conversation closed, because the direction you keep trying to take it does not appear to be helpful to the OP.

 

[ixidor]

let me reply to the part about the sas expanders only. as i have done hours on end of reserch on the chenbro card you mention, and the sas expander from HP, i think i can be helpful. if you dig deep enough on the chenbro site it will list 5-6 specific raid cards that their sas expander will work with. Obviously the Hp site only talks about their own servers and raid cards. but for price comparrison, a battery backed raid5,6 capable HP card and the expander should be around $700-800. i have seen a few sites that have paired the HP sas expander with other Raid cards and have gotten it to work. As for your INTEL one i do not know. but generally, it is raid cards that are $400+ that they will work with. the chenbro even lists an arcea card that is close to $1000. for me for the $, i finally decided that the cost of being able to connect 16 drives vs 24 was to much to bear at this time. so i am going to use 2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117157 think of it as host bus adapters. you could get a mobo that has 3+ pci-e 8x slots and run a third card. Since you want freenas to handle the backend raid stuff anyway.