I have an old server mainboard with 16 SATA ports and 7x PCI slots and wanting to make some use of it. I am thinking of getting 7x old PCI 8 port SATA cards and throwing in all my old HDDs, 500 GB ~ 1 TB size range. What I am wanting is something like this.
Expandable Volume
A way to expand array with redundancy without rebuilding the entire array (currently I have an 120 TB SAS array and it takes almost 2 months to add in disks). I.e. old data stays where it is and when extra drives are added the redundancy lies within their group but the volume expands (like how MS has the option to expand a volume with logical drives).
That way if there is a failure, only data in the group has a possibility of being corrupted and the rest are still fine. I am thinking maybe a mixture of JBOD with RAID 5.
I.e.
Group 1 8x RAID 5 Mode HDDs
Group 2 8x RAID 5 Mode HDDs
Group 3 8x RAID 5 Mode HDDs
Group 4 8x RAID 5 Mode HDDs
Volume 1 consists of JBOD groups 1 ~ 4. As new groups are added new data is written to blank space. OS with WOL (so it St3's when not in use and wakes up on LAN packet).
But here is the big one. Power management that spins down the HDDs and allows folder browsing without turning on every HDD on the system would be great if only the HDDs containing the data are the only ones that power up.
To sum it up, need to cut back on my power bill and running up to 70 odd HDDs 24/7 is not going to help.
Also wanting to leave hardware raid. The cards just die and are a pain to get replacements for when you need them!
Expandable Volume
A way to expand array with redundancy without rebuilding the entire array (currently I have an 120 TB SAS array and it takes almost 2 months to add in disks). I.e. old data stays where it is and when extra drives are added the redundancy lies within their group but the volume expands (like how MS has the option to expand a volume with logical drives).
That way if there is a failure, only data in the group has a possibility of being corrupted and the rest are still fine. I am thinking maybe a mixture of JBOD with RAID 5.
I.e.
Group 1 8x RAID 5 Mode HDDs
Group 2 8x RAID 5 Mode HDDs
Group 3 8x RAID 5 Mode HDDs
Group 4 8x RAID 5 Mode HDDs
Volume 1 consists of JBOD groups 1 ~ 4. As new groups are added new data is written to blank space. OS with WOL (so it St3's when not in use and wakes up on LAN packet).
But here is the big one. Power management that spins down the HDDs and allows folder browsing without turning on every HDD on the system would be great if only the HDDs containing the data are the only ones that power up.
To sum it up, need to cut back on my power bill and running up to 70 odd HDDs 24/7 is not going to help.
Also wanting to leave hardware raid. The cards just die and are a pain to get replacements for when you need them!