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Sammy

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Jdiesel

Flash how? Why?

 

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The card itself as shipped is meant to be used as a hardware RAID controller meaning the card itself manages the drives and presents the OS with the array. You can flash the card with a bios that disables this functionality and allows the card to function like a regular storage controlled (JBOD) that passes the drives directly to the OS. 

 

I've had many cheap consumer sata cards fail over the years (cheap marvell chipsets). The IBM (LSI) cards are enterprised quality and are bulletproof. 

 

Breakout cables turn the mini SAS ports on the card into 4 sata ports. 

Edited by Jdiesel
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arrbee99

No idea bout that Rosewill, only went for the R5 cos it has 8 3.5 bays, 2 5.25 bays and two extra round the back for ssd's. You pay for it though.

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Guest asrequested

Breakout Cables?

 

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The card has 2 SAS connectors. Each one will support 4 drives. They are designed to connect to a backplane. You'll be using individual drives, so there are cables that will breakout from the SAS to individual SATA connectors. So one card will support all 8 of your drives.

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The card has 2 SAS connectors. Each one will support 4 drives. They are designed to connect to a backplane. You'll be using individual drives, so there are cables that will breakout from the SAS to individual SATA connectors. So one card will support all 8 of your drives.

So they're adaptor cables? Does Monoprice sell them?

I see a 2pack Mini SAS to SATA on eBay. Is that the right thing?

 

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Edited by Sammy
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The card I linked to is ready to use. Just plug your drives in and you're done.

I'll check it out. Might be a better deal if it takes less time and I don't have to flash the BIOS..

 

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Edited by Sammy
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The card itself as shipped is meant to be used as a hardware RAID controller meaning the card itself manages the drives and presents the OS with the array. You can flash the card with a bios that disables this functionality and allows the card to function like a regular storage controlled (JBOD) that passes the drives directly to the OS.

 

I've had many cheap consumer sata cards fail over the years (cheap marvell chipsets). The IBM (LSI) cards are enterprised quality and are bulletproof.

 

Breakout cables turn the mini SAS ports on the card into 4 sata ports.

Where does one acquire the BIOS? Are there instructions on how to do this?

 

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If I go with m.2 I loose 3 SATA ports on the MoBo apparently so I'll be needing one of these 8-drive controllers for sure.

 

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Jdiesel

Where does one acquire the BIOS? Are there instructions on how to do this?

 

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https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/my-socket-2011v3-build.24842/#post-155960

 

You can also use a regular DOS boot disk with something like FreeDOS but not all motherboards like it. I went the UEFI route with my on my MSI motherboard.

 

 

There is some more info here if you want to read up on it.

 

https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/how-to-cross-flash-ibm-m1015-to-it-mode.25398/

Edited by Jdiesel
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Guest asrequested

So they're adaptor cables? Does Monoprice sell them?

I see a 2pack Mini SAS to SATA on eBay. Is that the right thing?

 

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They need to be forward breakout cables, not reverse breakout cables. They are quite easy to find.

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Spaceboy

Where does one acquire the BIOS? Are there instructions on how to do this?

 

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ive bought 3 second hand to date off eBay. All have been flashed before I received them
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So I am pretty sure that the Asrock Taichi Should be able to have enough interfaces for your need (I think they have 10 SATA). I upgraded to that model from an ITX board for:

1. Intel onboard NIC.

2. Tons of interfaces.

3. 3x PCIE 2.0 or larger interfaces (I have a intel i340-4T 2.0 4x port NIC, a 2.0 PCIE LSI 9207-8i HBA (needed for both VMware and FreeNAS compatibility), and 1 additional interface in case I need a PCIE video card or 10G port to pass through to a future VM firewall.

4. Up to 64 Gb ECC unbuffered memory support.

 

If you are dead set on buying an expansion card data controller I would recommending determining how you will manage the drives. There are 2 options RAID card and HBA. Raid card handles the drive configuration in the card, HBA allows you to configure from OS. You have the option to flash raid cards to function. As HBAs. You need to make sure that your OS supports the card used (part of the reason I chose the LSI 9207-8i is that I know both my use case operating systems (VMWare and FreeNAS) support it natively without having to side load any vendor drivers.

 

Personally, I prefer the HBA route and then use a software at the OS level to manage the disks. Here, I ended up passing the HBA to a FreeNAS VM then configured my drives in to 2 Raidz2 arrays.

 

If I were buying now I would be looking at the LSI 9300-8i or 16i. That, a few SAS to SATA SFF-8087 cables, and some good NAS/enterprise grade drives and it would be done.

 

For a case I use PLINKUSA. I use their rack mount cases. They are OK. I would recommend not buying their smaller cases if you intend on using a full size board. For a drive cage I bought a pair of their 3x5.25 to 5x3.5 hotswap drive cages they are OK too.

Edited by Tur0k
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Is m.2 really necessary for Emby? I don't notice significant lag now as it is and I put Emby data and transcoding on a separate SSD as it is so it seems two m.2 drives would be necessary?

 

Server or tower case?

 

Putting the final touches on my order before pulling the trigger.

 

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Spaceboy

Raid completely unnecessary for a media pc imo. In ten plus years of media pc use I’ve never had a drive fail such that I couldn’t get the data back. I do use drive bender and their duplication feature for my high value files, plus these days I back everything up to gdrive by rclone

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Spaceboy

I have an optane disk for my os. You can definitely tell the difference over a ssd but less so over m2 or nvme. I have a nvme 1tb disk as the landing disk for my drive pool which again makes everything a lot more snappy

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Raid completely unnecessary for a media pc imo. In ten plus years of media pc use I’ve never had a drive fail such that I couldn’t get the data back. I do use drive bender and their duplication feature for my high value files, plus these days I back everything up to gdrive by rclone

My experience as well..

 

Tell me more about clone. How many Tb do you store in the cloud?

 

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I have an optane disk for my os. You can definitely tell the difference over a ssd but less so over m2 or nvme. I have a nvme 1tb disk as the landing disk for my drive pool which again makes everything a lot more snappy

Tell me more about optain and nvme. I'm out of touch on the latest. Last build was going on 5 years ago now.

 

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Spaceboy

My experience as well..

 

Tell me more about clone. How many Tb do you store in the cloud?

 

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rclone runs via a simple scheduled task in windows after setting up gdrive as the target. i'm no expert but someone walked me through it step by step. was very easy. everything is synced to gdrive encrypted so they can't tell what it is. i bought gdrive for business, only costs me $5 a month i believe and although its only supposed to be unlimited storage for multiple users, i now have about 80Tb of my library up there. only limiting factor is the upload speed on your internet connection. here in the UK its pretty slow. 80Tb has taken me the best part of a year. :) i intend to have the whole lot backed up there. maybe this time next year!!

 

other benefits: i'm syncing as a backup but you can use rclone to just copy and then you can mount the remote gdrive as a local drive in windows so you can play direct from the cloud

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Spaceboy

Tell me more about optain and nvme. I'm out of touch on the latest. Last build was going on 5 years ago now.

 

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honestly, i'd probably recommend nvme / m2 over optane. i think i picked up a 1Tb nvme drive for c£100. it needs a pcie card to be used unless your motherboard supports it directly. its just a SSD with newer tech, i think is the best way of summarising it.

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5 USD or 5 GBP?

 

We have 20mbps no cap but need headroom for external Emby clients. Is it schedulable?

 

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Spaceboy

honestly, i'd probably recommend nvme / m2 over optane. i think i picked up a 1Tb nvme drive for c£100. it needs a pcie card to be used unless your motherboard supports it directly. its just a SSD with newer tech, i think is the best way of summarising it.

Is it SATA?

 

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