Dell t340 internal sata and H330 controller

[Julianh]

Hi All,

I have a Dell T340, running Trunas brilliantly. It has 5 x 8TB sata drives running from the H330, that was flashed as per https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/dell-t340-h330-flashing.92183/

I want to add 3 x 14TB Sata drives. I have 2 options, there are 3 slots spare on the chassis connecting to the H330, but also 3 x 5.25 bays and an unused Mini SAS connector on the motherboard. I could connect the 3 drives to the mini SAS connector on the motherboard and use the motherboard's SATA controller.

Woud I be right in thinking, if I used the on board SATA connector to the 3 new drives, as it's a different controller I'd get better performance. Or should I just plug them into the h330. In the future I may need to add an extra 8 tb drive, but that's months away if at all.

What do you think?

Thanks

 

[Whattteva]

Well, you can calculate that.
Dell H330 maxes out at 12 Gbps total bandwidth.
A single HDD usually maxes out around 1 Gbps.
So, you can have around 12 HDD on a single H330 before it starts slowing things down, but even that is assuming pure sequential performance. In reality, HDD's will rarely give you its max sequential performance especially if your workload involves more random access, so you can probably afford to add maybe even 2-3 more drives on that without noticing too much significant hit on performance.

Worth noting that if your objective is max performance, you also should go with striped mirrors over any RAIDZ.

 

[Julianh]

That's brilliant, in that case it makes life easier for me, I'll add them to the 8 bays.
I have them striped, if a disk dies it'll take 4 days to copy the data over, but that's ok
Have a great weekend