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The question of whether or not one can mix 7,200rpm hard drives with 5,400rpm (5,900rpm or other speed) “green” drives in RAID is one that I get asked constantly. My general advice is to not do it. While testing the Supermicro X8SI6-F and Supermicro X8SIL-F with a LSI 9211-8i (essentially making the setups very similar) I ran some Windows ATTO benchmarks which is a pretty decent benchmark for testing best case throughput. Read the full story

The Big WHS was originally supposed to house approximately 30TB of storage when the plans were first detailed on an Excel spreadsheet BOM in December 2009. This was a big upgrade to my first DIY Windows Home Server box that had well under 20TB. About five months later, the storage capacity has crested 60TB, with further room to expand. The Big WHS now spans two 4U Norco cases (using a total of 8U of rackspace and another 4U chassis is in the works) has over 60TB of storage, and requires well over a dozen ports on the gigabit switch.

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Just as a quick update to those who are following this build. Some adjustments have been made ove the past week.

First, I finally decided that 32 ports from two Adaptec 31605′s would first off be slightly less than I had wanted. I realized that while the initial build would hold 19-20 1.5TB drives, 6x 2TB drives, and 4x 1TB drives, odds are that I would want to add another 6-7 2TB drives in the next six months if for no other reason just to spread the storage a bit more.

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Just as an update. I installed the second Adaptec 31605 today, filling all 16 ports with 8x WD Greens, 6x Hitachi 2TB, and 2x Hitachi 1TB drives. There is an additional 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 being used as an OS drive. That’s 27.5TiB raw capacity.

Here’s a view of all the drives currently in The Big WHS. Note, I may have killed yet another WD Green. A single SMART error so I’m making quadruple sure that something isn’t wrong.

17 Drives, 27.5TiB Raw installed for testing

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First off, this is not a typical WHS build, and it was not meant to be. For the majority of users, a HP MediaSmart (by far the WHS to get if you do not DIY the build) is the way to go. For my purposes, I have seen a consistent, but increasing 500-600GB/mo of extra disk usage. Just for the record, unlike the opinion of certain Seagate executives, it is not for material of questionable moral value. Alas, I needed a solution that would allow me to have one box that could be upgraded and used for up to 24 months. As mentioned in Part 1, this project is an upgrade project and therefore I had some parts, and had a good idea of what I was doing before embarking on the project.

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About 10 months ago I decided to enter the world of the Windows Home Server. My storage arrays had outstripped my Cosmos S’s capacity, and running multiple controllers for all of the SAS drives as well as SATA storage became too much. My decision to build a WHS v. buy one was made due to sub-$100 Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 drives (at the time very inexpensive) so I bought another eight drives just to fill up an 8 port raid controller.

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Introduction

For Small Business Servers and home servers, one thing becomes apparent, the need to use raid with large data sets. Raid 1 and software mirroring technologies like Windows Drive Extender are too cost ineffective for large storage arrays. For example, if one has 1 TB of storage need and uses one of these mirroring redundancy option, they need 1TB extra storage for a complete backup. Likewise, if an administrator uses four 1TB drives for data storage, then another four 1TB drives would be needed for redundancy. Raid 5 offers a user with both more performance than Raid 1 and lower “lost” capacity due to redundancy storage. Instead of effective storage capacity of n/2 for Raid 1, Raid 5 allows for n-1 of storage capacity.

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Although more will follow, here’s a quick glimpse of what a cheap, but quality hardware raid solution can do with cheap, and large SATA drives in Raid 5. Keep in mind that the Perc 5/i uses the old IOP333 CPU clocked at 500MHz. Many current 3 series Adaptec products, for example, utilize the IOP333 at 800MHz. Also, one should note that there are reports that the IOP348 has some issues with SATA drives making the below representative of very inexpensive ($1000) raid arrays with huge capacities.

Raid 0 with 8 Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB drives with a Dell Perc 5/i 1MB stripe

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Two 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 drives on the ICH10R in raid 1 make a nice setup. The ICH10R is an on-board semi-hardware raid controller making it a very cheap option to use in any home server. The Seagate 1.5TB drives are one of the highest capacity drives readily available in Q1 2009 and have the best price/GB available. Raid 1 is probably the best way to gain redundancy when there are two disks in the system.

Intel ICH10R Raid 1 w/ 2x Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB 7200rpm drives

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