Greetings friends,
I've visited the forum a few times over the last couple years out of interest, but have not been seriously interested in building a NAS until that lovely Black Friday sale a couple weeks ago. I'll be coming home from a year in the sandbox soon and wanted to purchase a small Christmas present for myself. That being said, I've purchased the drives (kinda went crazy because of BF deals), case and processor so far...
Purchased
Purchase Under Consideration
Now, from my understanding this build will offer me a hell of a lot of scalability. The motherboard has (2) x16 and (2) x8 PCI-e ports, meaning that in the future I could purchase another 3 IBM Serveraid M1015's, and the board itself has 8 SATA3 ports to play with. I think that's pretty nice and the cards only costing ~$100 isn't too much of a hit.
I've read that software RAID supports drives being pooled together from different controllers, etc. making it extremely flexible and allowing you to use different sized drives, etc. This excites me, as I've wanted to repurpose the growing JBOD in my gaming desktop.
Question: If I want to get 16 drive support, and my motherboard supports 8 SATA3 drives, I only need to purchase (1) 8-port controller card correct? ZFS will allow me to create a zpool with drives from BOTH the motherboard AND from the controller correct? Further, if I need more drive density, I simply purchase another controller (as mentioned above), flash it to IT mode and plug the drives into it, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, any input into this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much for your time.
S/F,
Dan
I've visited the forum a few times over the last couple years out of interest, but have not been seriously interested in building a NAS until that lovely Black Friday sale a couple weeks ago. I'll be coming home from a year in the sandbox soon and wanted to purchase a small Christmas present for myself. That being said, I've purchased the drives (kinda went crazy because of BF deals), case and processor so far...
Purchased
- 10x Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
- LIAN LI PC-D8000 Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case
- AMD FX-4100 Zambezi 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor FD4100WMGUSBX
Purchase Under Consideration
- GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
- CORSAIR HX Series HX850 850W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
- CORSAIR Vengeance Performance 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 Desktop Memory Model CMZ32GX3M4A1866C9
- 46M0831 IBM Serveraid M1015 8channel PCI E X8 SAS SATA Raid Controller
- SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5450 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card ( 100292DDR3L)
Now, from my understanding this build will offer me a hell of a lot of scalability. The motherboard has (2) x16 and (2) x8 PCI-e ports, meaning that in the future I could purchase another 3 IBM Serveraid M1015's, and the board itself has 8 SATA3 ports to play with. I think that's pretty nice and the cards only costing ~$100 isn't too much of a hit.
I've read that software RAID supports drives being pooled together from different controllers, etc. making it extremely flexible and allowing you to use different sized drives, etc. This excites me, as I've wanted to repurpose the growing JBOD in my gaming desktop.
Question: If I want to get 16 drive support, and my motherboard supports 8 SATA3 drives, I only need to purchase (1) 8-port controller card correct? ZFS will allow me to create a zpool with drives from BOTH the motherboard AND from the controller correct? Further, if I need more drive density, I simply purchase another controller (as mentioned above), flash it to IT mode and plug the drives into it, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, any input into this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much for your time.
S/F,
Dan