Controllers dead, whole bunch of HDs, what to do? Advice please?

[silkshadow]

So I returned from a trip for work to find my Sage server toasted. It looks like my raid/ATA controllers died. They were generic pieces of garbage so its not much of a loss . However, now I am looking at the following:

1 120gb Western Digital
1 160gb Western Digital
1 200gb Seagate
3 100gb Western Digital
1 200gb Western Digital
2 60gb Maxtor
3 80gb Maxtor

Yeah, thats one big mess of hard drives. :yikes: They are all PATA of various ATA ratings (from ATA100 to ATA133). Worse yet, they all have data on them and were previously in various stripe configs (raid 5, mirror arrays, single stipped, performace arrays and even JOB arrays). However, I am ok with loosing data on most of them actually. There is really only around 400 gbs that I don't have backed up elsewhere and, of that, around 300 gbs that I cannot loose. That 300gbs were in mirror arrays so I just need a new raid card that can rebuild them.

Truthfully, I have been waiting for this kind of breakdown to happen so I can redo how the disks are configured as well as add another 3-4 SATA drives in a raid 5 array to this server. Before this meltdown, everything was a total mess and my hard drive performance went from awsome to crappy on an hourly basis.

So, I would really appreciate some advice. I, obviously, need to buy a new raid/ata card or three. So I need some help with raid card recommendations. I also would seriously appreciate some advice on how to configure all these drives in a single server. I am ok with not using a few of the smaller capacity drives in the new config. They can be put into other computers or something. Ideally, I'd like to mix all the above ATA drives with the new SATA drives I'm going to buy but I can't find anything that does this. I barely even know how to even start putting this all back together. Oh, and I am fine with getting a new mobo for this server as well if you think that would help. I'm not flush with cash but I do have a toy budget which I haven't spent in a bit . I'd like to try and go as budget as possible without sacrificng too much performance. Thanks for any guidance!

[jwheelhouse]

Originally Posted by silkshadow

So, I would really appreciate some advice. I, obviously, need to buy a new raid/ata card or three. So I need some help with raid card recommendations.

I swear by these (3Ware 9500S-8). Note they are 66Mhz 64bit PCI so make sure you get a motherboard to take advantage of that.

Of course, they won't do you much good with those PATA drives, so you may want to try these (WD 250gb SATA RAID Edition) or if you are both wealthy and completely insane for TV toss in a fistful of these (Seagate SATA NCQ 400GB).

You ought to think about how badly you need RAID though if you are not doing something commercial with Sage. RAID offers little benefit in the Sage environment. RAID 5 in particular will kill your write performance, and for what?

You say you have some data you care about, so maybe mirror a couple of those older drives from Windows for that, but if you are ok with losing some of the rest, why goof with RAID 5? Sage will make good use of many video directories on discrete disks and you will get far better performance than you would with RAID.*

*In almost all, but not all cases.

(EDIT: Oops, I missed the budget part. 3Ware also makes a 4 port version which you could use with the new drives and then whatever motherboard you get is likely to have 4-6 regular ATA/SATA ports.)

[Lucas]

Silkshadow, I think you will find it near impossible to recover any data from any of those disks if they were part of an array(0,5,10) or JBOD. RAID 1 array disks can be connected to the appopriate IDE port and will be recognised as a valid drive.
The only glimmer of hope(for the RAID 0,5,10 arrays) is if you get exactly the same controller you had before and maybe it will be able to see them, if it stored the array configuration on the disks. If the array configs were in controller memory then.....

As to getting new controllers... by all means but I agree that any RAID or JBOD config is not really necessary with SageTV.

What I have, is 8 Drives mixed ATA and SATA.

Only 2 of them are RAID1. These contain the OS partition and my music collection.
Another four appear as separated drives (physical and logical). Sage TV sees them as one recording area.
The final 2 Drives, I use as a backup area where, once per week I copy files that I consider valuable and would not like to loose in the event of disk failure.

With this setup, if one disk fails then I lose only the data on that disk.

With RAID 0,5,10 if the controller goes then.....everythings goes.

[silkshadow]

Thanks ALOT guys! That makes a ton of sense! I thought raiding those would give me better consistent drive performance - duh on me . Nope, no commercial use at all but I do store my DVD rips, MP3s, roms, etc on there. I discovered that the generic cards I had before used promise chipsets for soft raid. I emailed them asking about data recovery but, sounds like I am SOL.

So would you recommend getting just an additional ATA controler or 2 for the PATA drives? Are there any like 8-port ATA control cards anywhere (I'm Googling now but not finding anything)? Or maybe a mobo with a ton of PATA IDE ports? Any bus slowdown if I use too many ATA controllers? Jwheelhouse, thanks for the raid card recomend. I think maybe I'll use all the PATA drives (on ATA controller(s)) for non-backedup storage and Sage recordings. Then get a SATA raid card (plus drives) for the stuff I want mirrored? Does that sound good?

Thanks again!

[Lucas]

There are plenty of 1-2-4 port IDE PCI cards. You can put a master-slave pair of disks on each port.

If you don't go RAID then they are not that costly.
I think that with that many IDE drives you should stick with PATA.

Performance is one thing thing to worry about. Since it will share the same PCI bus as the capture cards, there may be some issues. Some people had problems with some motherboards.

With the SATA RAID option, you will still have the SATA controller being a single point of failure.

[salsbst]

I have just ordered parts to build a file server around the Areca 1260 RAID card ( http://areca.us/ ) and 300GB SATA II NCQ hard drives. I'm hoping it turns out to be a great setup.

The card was very favorably reviewed here: http://tweakers.net/reviews/557/ .

While converting to SATA might make the PATA drives redundant, you're going to do it some day, right? Most of your drives are not in the sweet spot for $/GB anymore. zipzoomfly is selling the Seagate NCQ 300GB drives for $200, though I ordered my drives from various retailers in order to reduce the chance of getting multiple drives from the same lot.

Could you use a PATA to SATA bridge to put your old PATA drives onto a SATA RAID controller? http://www.modsynergy.com/review98.htm

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by silkshadow

So would you recommend getting just an additional ATA controler or 2 for the PATA drives? Are there any like 8-port ATA control cards anywhere (I'm Googling now but not finding anything)?

You could look for one of the older 3ware cards on Ebay. The 5800s (no RAID-5) were all over ebay really cheap for a while.

[jwheelhouse]

I agree with the guy who suggested blowing off the smaller drives... the ones under 100gb for sure, and if it were me, the 100's and 120's as well. Besides, that many PATA drives has got to be a cabling nightmare.

RAID will give you more consistent performance, yes, just not necessarily better.

My WAG is that recording on best takes about 1.6MB/sec. As long as you don't get a lot of file fragmentation, you should not have a problem unless it's some weird case where you have like four tuners and two clients that all wind up contending for the same spindle, which is farfetched but not impossible.

At some point you will saturate a 32bit PCI bus with PATA drives/controllers (or 32-bit SATA controllers) but this is definitely not a TV-watching issue for most people. I'm too lazy and tired to do the actual math though.

[salsbst]

I'd say stop the bleeding as far as the PATA situation goes. Those drives are going the way of the dodo. Better not to invest in new PATA raid cards and new PATA drives. Migrate. Don't throw it all away, but begin to migrate now.

To be clear upfront, I have not used this product, but it appears that this http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/AM1010.php would allow you to jump to SATA for your RAID card while slowly migrating your drives. And this one, unlike the one I linked to above, seems to be available for sale.

You might buy one of these adapters to see if it works, then get a SATA raid card that you can afford, and get as many of these adapters as you need. As you replace drives over time, buy SATA drives and put the PATA->SATA adapters up on ebay as you retire your PATA drives.

As to how to arrange them, I'd say one RAID 1 array for the two smallest drives (60 & 80) for your OS, then a RAID 5 array of the rest of them as a data volume.

Having said all of this, this was a recommendation based on your statement that there is a budget concern.

In the long haul, it might be better to plan for more growth -- throw all of your drives up on ebay, invest in a good SATA board, and start fresh.

I honestly don't know what the right choice is for you. Heck, I don't know that I've really made the right choice for myself. But I have just gone down the "out with the old" road, and will be putting 4 very healthy PATA 160GB drives up on ebay once I migrate to 300GB drives in a new box.

Good luck! Dealing with a RAID array is a little nerve-wracking, and it seems there is no silver bullet.

P.S. The comment about saturating a PCI bus should be echoed. I went with PCI Express x8 for the system I'm now building. If you plan to use your array for AV media in the future, I'd suggest you might begin to move away from the old-fashioned PCI 32bit now, while you're buying new stuff.

[dvd_maniac]

I have 8 hard drives in my system now.

4x300GB IDE in Raid-5 Promise sx-4060 (Not the best Raid card but good value, I wish I did some more research)
2x200GB Sata Raid-1 through WinXP Disk Management
2x250GB IDE no raid

I also have 2 more 250GB, 1 200GB, 1 120GB and 3 80GB IDE drives. I use these drives to archive video through External USB2/Firewire devices. I could sell them on Ebay but I find them Useful for this purpose. I bought an External Hard Drive Case at CompUSA for $49.00.

[silkshadow]

Wow! Thanks so much! When the my oogly hard drive system collapsed on me, I took one look at all those drives and wondered in dispair: "what the heck am I gonna do?" You guys have been so helpful! Looks like I am going to have to do some hard shopping over this next week. Thankfully, my "toy" budget hasn't been spent in awhile and it has been building up a bit .

@Salsbst, that dive config you suggested sounds real good. I will start looking into that direction. However, the suggestion to start afresh is very tempting. When you say:

I'd suggest you might begin to move away from the old-fashioned PCI 32bit now, while you're buying new stuff.

That sounds like great advice. Unfortunately I didn't understand it . I haven't been keeping up with new hardware techs. Would you mind pointing me in a motherboard direction that does what you are suggesting? Just something to start looking at and understanding so I can figure out what what I'd be looking at.

[salsbst]

Here's how I understand the PCI situation. I may be wrong.

Old-fashioned PCI 32 bit/33MHz is 132Mb/s.

PCI-Express' bandwidth is 2.5Gbps per lan. An x8 port (8 lanes) gives you 20Gbps. If you combine that with a card that supports PCI-Express x8 (the areca board that I mentioned above, for example), you have a very fast bus.

I can't speak for this board, because it's still sitting in anti-static wrap while I await my case's delivery, but here's what I've chosen:

http://www.intel.com/design/servers/boards/SE7221BA1-E/

If you aren't interested in building a file server that can handle multiple HDTV streams, then this stuff may not be practical today. But if you're building for the future, now might be the time to start investing in parts that support PCIe.

Here's an article that talks about the evolution of PCIe: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paed...dware/pcie.ars

[silkshadow]

Thanks salsbst! Sorry for the delay, took a vaction over Easter. Luckilly I spent my vacation with a girl who is a comp sci student. She spent 2 weeks bringing me up to speed on raid and hardware (well thats no all she was doing ). Anyway, I spent yesterday reading up and going over all thes things you suggested and she told me about.

Seems this is a bad time to try and get a raid 5 based consumer server together. Its all transitional right now. The Areca is the only PCI-e card avalible and its over $500 and thats just for the 4-port version. Thats a bit steep for my non-professional needs . All the other cards run on PCI-x and will experience bottlenecks and slowdowns in a regular PCI slot. However, only server mobos come with pci-x and they are all outdated (no sataII, no pci-e, etc). However, it seems more PCI-e raid 5 cards will be coming out soon. However, I doubt they will be much cheaper than the areca.

As a solution, I found this MSI board the K8N Neo4 Platinum http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p...tinum&class=mb. It does raid 5 on board. It runs Silicon Image's SiI 3114 raid host controller (software raid). Does anyone know how it will perform? I am not looking for speed but smooth performance is a must.

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by silkshadow

As a solution, I found this MSI board the K8N Neo4 Platinum http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p...tinum&class=mb. It does raid 5 on board. It runs Silicon Image's SiI 3114 raid host controller (software raid). Does anyone know how it will perform? I am not looking for speed but smooth performance is a must.

Well, for multipe tuners recording with simultaneous playback(s) to/from RAID5 array seems you need speed to get smooth performance! Of course, the question is how much speed and speed where? I can't speak specifically to that mobo and it's RAID5 software implementation, but my question would be does it support write back cache for it's RAID5 arrays? With my Escalade 9500S-8 7xHD RAID5 with write back cache enabled playback, even multiple playback streams, is smooth with 5 concurrently recordings. If controller write back cache disabled playback becomes choppy with multiple records happening.

[silkshadow]

Thanks for that info mdmint! Here's the link for the controller chip: http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=28. The closest thing I can find that even remotely matches that is it "Supports command buffering for ATA TF shadow registers". I don't think thats the same thing though . I'm going to try and find more info. The website says I have to get it from a sales rep but a little BS should get me somewhere.

Edit: Nothing new in the sales docs. I've posted in lots of hardware forums asking if anyone has used the SiI 3114 controller - not one response. So I guess its not that popular. Oh well, guess I'll be a guinea pig and give it a try.