10 TB for $1,000: Tom’s Hardware's Über RAID Array
Table of contents
- 1. The 10 TB Array
- 2. Test Drive: 12 x Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ (1 TB)
- 3. Array And Controller Details
Need more capacity? Want more hard drive performance? Knowing that hard drive prices are about to drop below $80 for a 1 TB drive, we decided to create the ultimate RAID array, one that should be able store all of your data for years to come while providing much faster performance than any individual drive could. Twelve Samsung 1 TB hard drives helped us to reach speed records and an impressive 10 TB net capacity.
Some of you may want to argue over this performance statement. After all, doesn’t everyone know that hard drives don’t stand a chance against solid state drives (SSDs)? It’s true. More and more high-end SSDs can now exceed 200 MB/s read and 100 MB/s write throughput with virtually zero access time—numbers that are becoming standard for more and more high-end SSDs. However, lofty SSD costs remain an issue, which is where good old hard drives kick in.
While hard drives can’t match an SSD’s quick access times, higher throughput can be achieved by using more than one drive in a striping RAID mode—and throughput is still the top characteristic people care about on their desktop systems. In addition, hard drive capacities exceed SSD capacities by many times over and also beat SSDs in terms of cost per gigabyte. For example, $1,000 won’t buy you more than 1 TB in SSD capacity, and even to get close requires taking a step or two down in performance. Meanwhile, with hard drives, we had 12 x 1 TB at our disposal. The only reason we didn’t use larger hard drives was constrained availability in quantities of ten or more.
The Idea: Massive Hard Drive Storage Within a $1,000 Budget
The prospect of using up to 12 3.5” hard drives in RAID certainly isn’t very applicable for desktop PCs. Twelve drives require a lot of space, a suitable SATA RAID controller, and they produce a noticeable amount of heat, noise, and vibration, as well. Still…it’s cool, and we’ll soon see what a massive RAID array using conventional hard drives can actually do.
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RAID 0 rullezzz
how is this 10TB for $1000? Its more like 10TB for $2199 because that controller card itself is $1199 on newegg....
yeah, can we see some performance benchmarks of a realistic configuration with these 12 drives in a media server? You'd never run this in your main PC cos the noise is stoooopid. You could also save $$$ by using software RAID under Windows or MDADM in Linux. Any chance you can look into iSCSI booting off software RAID?
Pg. 3 first paragraph, "and with 12 drives, we were able to reach a total gross capacity of 12 GB."
LOL.
Pg. 3 first paragraph, "and with 12 drives, we were able to reach a total gross capacity of 12 GB."LOL.
small beans. real men use a 40 drive chassis with 2TB drives, reaching a total 'gross' capacity of 80TB. thats what I'm talkin about. lol.
I don't think you can build for $1000, like yobigd20 said the controller would make that over $2000. I have a list of parts that could make up a 10 - 12Tb system in the UK for about £2000 (Approx. $3,248.66). This would be a case, PSU, CPU Memory and Board to take the components.
I have chosen a case with 11 5.25" Bays and then got 3x 5x3.5 SATA Chassis that fit 3x 5.25" Bays. I have also chosen a PSU with 12x SATA Power Connectors. I finally chosen a 4Gb AMD system with a built in 1Gb LAN card for the network.
Qty Description Inc VAT
3 IcyDock MB-455SPF 5x3.5" Sata II Hot Swap into 3x5.25" £275.97
1 Areca ARC-1230 12 x PCI-E to SATA II RAID Controller £570.37
1 Sharkoon Rebel 12 Value Edition black 11x 5.25" £75.89
12 1TB Samsung HD103UJ Spinpoint F1,SATA 3Gb/s, 7200rpm, £751.96
1 1000W Corsair HX Series PSU ATX, EPS12V, UK Version £169.17
1 LG GH22NS40 22x DVD±R, 16xDVD±DL,DVD+RW x8/-RWx6, Black £16.43
1 Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-UD2H, AMD 780G, AM2+,mATX £60.13
1 AMD Athlon 64 X2 7850 BlackEdition, AM2+, Detail £45.99
1 4GB (2x2GB)Corsair TwinX XMS2, PC2-6400,CAS 5-5-5-18 £37.54
Total £2,003.45
It is rather interesting to see that RAID 5 seems a lot less peaky in terms of throughput than RAID 0... wonder what the reason is for that.
If you where going for pure speed you should try using RAID 10, yes it does cut storage by half but the speed improvemet would be between 70 and 80 %.
"result in 11 GB net capacity in RAID 5 or 10 GB in RAID 6"
I love typos...
I have two systems similar to this, one with 16 x 750GB drives, and one with 12 x 1Tb drives, the raid cards can be expensive , but I paid less than £150 for a Adaptec raid 6 16 port cards on the bay, and less than that for 2 x dell Perc5i cards. I use a AMD 780G board on one which frees up a x16 PCIe on one and a Nvidia triple SLI board for the two DEll Perc 5is, not too expensive at all. Run the 16 port one in RAID6 the Dells in RAID 0, and mirror the data across the two machines using synch software.
Having attempted to use Windows software RAID5 with a 6x750GB config my recommendation is "don't". Same opinion of motherboard RAID5. Very slow, very unreliable. RAID0+1, sure, they work fine. YMMV.
I have a RocketRaid 2320 (8port) running the 6x750GB on Win7RC1x64 and it's now happily 3.5TB. On XP there was a 2TB limit on drive size.
Problem with 12 drives and RAID5 is the risk of a 2nd failure while rebuilding a failed drive. The more drives, the larger the chance of failure at any moment in time.
And backup (RAID is not backup)... what's the best way to backup 10TB? (I don't backup my 3.5TB -- but I know I should).
Is there any way of making RAID 60?
What about same controller with 12 x Intel X25-E Professional Flash SSD (32 GB) drives ?
Will it be 384 GB HDD with 2000 MB/s read & 1700 MB/s write speed ?
I really would like to see that experiment results.
Are desktop drives such as the Spinpoint F1 suitable in the long-run fo RAID systems? Or do you need the 'RAID edition' drives?
Are desktop drives such as the Spinpoint F1 suitable in the long-run fo RAID systems? Or do you need the 'RAID edition' drives?
I used a pair of older 500GB Samsung drives in RAID0 and later in RAID1 mode, and they ran perfectly fine. Now I use them individually as purely backup drives.
I currently have 2.75TB of space in my primary PC. I am shying away from RAID right now because I can't afford a second 1TB HDD to make the RAID1 work. I might experiment though with my two 500GB and see if I can do a RAID0 then use that drive to make a RAID1 with the other 1TB drive. Mmmmmmmmmm.
Really the most pointless waste of time and effort I've ever seen in an article, almost as much as me writing this, but there's nothing on tv =0). May as well have got 500 SATA disks, seek latency is a million times more important than throughput and these and that controller can't do a thing about it, that is why 15k drives and SSD's came about, that's why nobody serious sets up storage like this. bored of typing now... ta ta.
If you lose a disk on a RAID 5 set this size, the chances of a read error occuring while rebuilding the array is too high. That is why you should be using RAID 6 - not to protect against losing a second disk, but to protect against a read error - the second parity disk of RAID 6 will solve this.