Looking at a 24 Bay hot swap case for my set-up

[1971camaroguy 23]

Hey Everyone,

Trying to find a better solution for my current media server and wanting a larger case. The most I have seen that can be hot swapped is 24 Bay.

I found a couple of refurbished 5U Chenbro's on eBay I really like but they are sata II and not sata III, and discontinued 5 years ago. 

I may know the answer to this, but I should probaly buy a similar case, like a Norco that has sata III on the backplane? 

I would prob see a definite performance difference between the 300 MB/s and 600 MB/s wouldn't I? E

EDIT: After thinking on this, spin drives wouldn't approach sata II speeds anyways, and the OS / Apps will be on a nvme drive

I would only be streaming my movies and TV locally along with copying files.

Thanks!

EDIT: I should also mention, I am looking for just a case, I have the mother board and other bits already

AMD Ryzen 7 2700x

ASRock X370 Motherboard

32GB Corsair DD4 memory

WD 1TB NVME Drive on the motherboard

 

 

RM(519).pdf

Edited October 29, 2021 by 1971camaroguy

[rbjtech 4265]

As you have indicated - SATA II vs SATA III will not make any difference for physical HDD's - as they are the bottleneck, not the SATA interface.

 

[Carlo 4330]

Well I wouldn't say that.  While individual drives may not that's a limit of the bus speed which could be handling data from multiple drives.
I would not get a SATA II enclosure unless you get it for a real bargain price.

[1971camaroguy 23]

I went ahead and got the sata II case, I made an offer and got it right at 600 shipped. While not a completly great deal, it wasn't bad compared to the norco's out there. And it comes with a (3 + 1) 1200 watt power supply set-up. It's a commercial grade case.

I can use the top two 3.5" internal bays for two parity drives and the 24 bay externals will be reserved for data storage. And the motherboard nvme drive can be for caching. Planning on running unraid I think.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234045143412

Edited November 1, 2021 by 1971camaroguy

[rbjtech 4265]

56 minutes ago, cayars said:

Well I wouldn't say that.  While individual drives may not that's a limit of the bus speed which could be handling data from multiple drives.
I would not get a SATA II enclosure unless you get it for a real bargain price.

I've been running SATA II controllers for years without issues and still do (on SATA 3 disks) - you simply do not have bottlenecks using SATA 2 interfaces when streaming media - If you do, then you have something set up wrong..  SATA II in real life ~150-200Mbytes  / sec, with that in mind, even a 4K Remux only needs 13 Mbytes/sec read speed.    On a multiplexed SATA channel, this still gives plenty of headroom for streaming I/O for many many clients.

Would I buy a SATA II backplane now - likely not, but I think for typical use, having SATA II instead of SATA III is not going to impact the OP at all.

[Carlo 4330]

Exactly you're at 150-200Mb which is basically single disc speeds. Start setting up large RAID setups with dozens of SDD/HDD as you likely would in a 24 bay enclosure and you're transfer rate is far higher than that.

It really depends on need and what you want to do with the storage. If it's strictly for Emby and some storage for documents and things like that SATA II is fine.  If you do stuff like I do  with graphic work and other large files, backups, snapshots, replication or other things you'll be wanting a network 5 to 10 times faster than that.

Like I've mentioned before I have a lot of storage just on USB3 as well but it's not my daily use storage. So it all depends.

[rbjtech 4265]

SATA is not like a hub, it is like a switch - you are only limited by the controllers uplink bandwidth, not the host SATA type.  We'll have to agree to disagree Carlo - I have over 120 Tb on SATA II - it works just fine for everything I have thrown at it over the last 10+ years and I've worked it hard ....  

[Carlo 4330]

You don't want to compare storage.

It's actually a bus and interface.  With a SATA II bus you're limited to 3 Gb/s and with SATA III it's 6 Gb/s.
One SSD drive can saturate a SATA II bus and be right at the SATA III level.  You can easily do the same RAID as well as your throughput is much higher when multiple drives are involved (to a point).

The discs will share the bus. In a 24 bay box there is not 24 different buses but only a few. They use a port multiplier which allows multiple drives to share the same bus. Take a look at any of the 4 to 8 bay storage boxes you can buy with eSata connections.  How many eSata connections does it have?  Everyone of the 8 bay boxes I have use one eSata cable so that means all 8 drives share the same bus.  It better be a SATA III bus!  But in order to use a port multiplier or a enclose that features this you need to have a computer that read data from the SATA bus that uses port multipliers and not all do. Most don't actually and you need to get add in cards.

If you were to just go out and buy a tower computer that has 4 normal HDD bays, an optical drive and an SSD drive more than likely those 6 devices will share 2 or maybe 3 SATA buses.
If building a high end server meant to serve up storage you would be very careful and get a different motherboard with at least 4 SATA III buses but they are more expensive.

This is one of the reasons you'll see people use SAS vs SATA or people going to iSCSI using SAN technology as you can build smaller nodes of storage pods using SATA III and combine these into higher throughputs.

[rbjtech 4265]

Carlo - seriously, I know all of that - I have worked with Petabyte SAN Arrays in Data centres for years and am well aware of the difference between the CONTROLLER bus (backplane if you like) and host (disk) based bus.

Lets leave it at that - the OP can report back if they like and I almost guarantee that they will not have any 'speed issues' what-so-ever in using SATA II for a 'typical' mass media storage.

[1971camaroguy 23]

Thanks both of you for your insight, case should be here friday so I am hoping this will be my weekend project. 

As stated, I only need something to access all of my remux rips and direct play without transcoding. I have a home theater and wanted the best user experience as I can possibly get with emby.

I have both a dune HD player and a nvidia shield to play through from my server, I use the shield most of the time..

Home is wired with a gigabit lan, hardwired with cat 5e and cat 6 cable..going back to a HP gigabit comercial grade switch

I don't do video editing or anything like that. The biggest file that I would be streaming over my home network is a 4K file that's about 90gb. Average files are around 20-35GB

 

 

Edited November 2, 2021 by 1971camaroguy