Hard drive configuration with sata controller card

[victorl]

I have 6x3TB, four on the motherboard and two on a SATA PCI-e card. What would be an optimal way to configure the hard drives? Put all six hard drives in a RAID-Z2, or I was considering the 4 on the motherboard as RAID-Z2 and the two on the SATA card as mirrored.
I am just worried if all six hard drives were in a RAID-Z2, and the SATA card fails, then two hard drives goes down. Any thoughts?

 

[hugovsky]

Best is to make it as raid-z2. But don't expect to have good perfomance. You're using old hardware.

EDIT: And if card fails, you lose ALL redundancy until you get those 2 disks online again. So, probably not a good ideia. Even if doing like you say, you will lose access to that vdev. If you love your data, buy new hardware.

 

[gpsguy]

You didn't provide your use case. For general storage RAIDz2 would be great.

OTOH, if you plan to serve up iSCSI, then a stripe of mirrors would be better.

 

[victorl]

Right now I have my system set up as RAIDz1 and it has been running smoothly for little over a year. It currently has 4x3TB via motherboard, but I recently got two more 3TB so I am gonna get a SATA card to add the extra drives.
I am only using the system as a media server right (using only DLNA) now so nothing too important is on there. But I might just keep the drives on my motherboard and sata card as two separate vdevs.

 

[gpsguy]

I'd go with all the drives in RAIDz2. For extra SATA ports consider the 8 port IBM 1015 HBA which would give you the needed ports now and allow for expansion down the road. Cost on eBay is about $120 USD + you'd need some breakout cables.


Sent from my phone

 

[hugovsky]

If you don't need security just make a stripe out of that drives to use the space.

 

[victorl]

Thanks for the feedback. I will probably get the 8-port IBM M1015 HBA at a later time for a future build. My system now was a first/cheap build and the two extra drives will be the only upgrade that I will make. So an inexpensive 2-port SATA card will work for now. Also, this system has a 450W PSU, and I want to avoid installing beyond six drives on this set up. I have seen 8 drives on a 450W but I personally do not want to go down that road.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Even a 360W PSU can handle 8 drives without problems so no need to worry about that ;)