Best way to add multiple HDD connections to a motherboard?

[jabbr]

1 hour ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

Quoting myself here, I saw the specs for the card and yes it does indeed run at 10G. However, does a 25GbE SFP slot require a different transceiver than a 10GbE or are they the same? Will a 10GbE transceiver work in the 25GbE slot? If I need identical transceivers at both ends, will the 25GbE transceiver work at the 10GbE switch sip slot?

 

I am truly out beyond all my previously acquired knowledge here.

 

The SFP28 (25Gbe) devices are much better than older at autosensing and adapting to the other end. They work at 10GBase-X and 1000base-X. Much in the same way that copper Ethernet autosenses (by specification). You can typically put an SFP(+) device in an SFP28 slot but not all devices are compatible with all slots. 

[jabbr]

49 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

 

Those drive cages look like the biggest pain in the ass I can imagine. I was just going to put 12 drives on 12 drive trays in the case, just as Fractal shows on their website, and then plug 6 each into the two connections on the SAS HBA card. I talked to Puget Systems about this and they stopped offering those cages because they were such a pain to work with.

 

How often do you replace a drive or two? I am working on the assumption maybe once or twice a year at most.

I use the pc-pitstop SAS3 external expander enclosures and the trayless HD slots work great.

 

You don't need to replace often -- every few years -- so you **could** write down the serial numbers of all the drives and then you will know exactly which drive to replace, or you can try and get the drive light to blink and then know which one to replace, but I end up trying to pair a brand new and an older drives to reduce the chance that both drives in a mirror will fail close to the same time.

 

NVME drives are of course different and the PCIe controller is slick and the next greatest thing. An array of NVME drives can easily exceed 10Gbe and that's where 25,50,100Gbe is finding an increasing use. Not necessary for audio.

[AudioDoctor]

2 hours ago, jabbr said:

You don't need to replace often -- every few years -- so you **could** write down the serial numbers of all the drives and then you will know exactly which drive to replace,

 

This is what I was planning on doing, as well as building the ZFS array by disk ID and not SDC/SDD/SDE/SDF/ etc...

[AudioDoctor]

@jabbr Is managing one of these any different than the equivalent number of internal drives would be as far as creating pools,, vdevs, and the like? Is there a special function one of these external expanders has to show me which drive is burnt out, for example? I am trying to figure out, other than ease of replacing a drive, what I get out of these.

[jabbr]

Nope the SAS cable just goes out instead of in — really just a style option. If you want to daisy chain external enclosures you can. 

[AudioDoctor]

2 hours ago, jabbr said:

Nope the SAS cable just goes out instead of in — really just a style option. If you want to daisy chain external enclosures you can. 

 

Good to know, thanks.

 

In your opinion, is my plan of a 5600x and 64GB of ECC RAM sufficient to manage a 12 drive ZFS pool and 2 Vdevs with not a lot of IO, but steadily increasing music storage for many years to come?

[jabbr]

19 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

Good to know, thanks.

 

In your opinion, is my plan of a 5600x and 64GB of ECC RAM sufficient to manage a 12 drive ZFS pool and 2 Vdevs with not a lot of IO, but steadily increasing music storage for many years to come?

Nice to know it supports ECC RAM … 64 Gb is great. You don’t need much CPU power at all. 

[AudioDoctor]

6 hours ago, jabbr said:

Nice to know it supports ECC RAM … 64 Gb is great. You don’t need much CPU power at all. 

 

Apparently all the 5000X series Ryzen do, depending on the motherboard. Asus claims all their X570 and B550 boards do with the X series chips.

[yamamoto2002]

It is better to enable ECC periodical memory scrubbing on BIOS and set its interval to 24 hours, to self-heal single bit memory upset.

[AudioDoctor]

Call me skeptical but.. Is this real ECC RAM?

 

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1729153-REG/sabrent_sb_dr5u_16gx4_laptop_ddr5_4x16gb_4800mhz.html

 

It says Integrated ECC, but I am suspicious.

[yamamoto2002]

7 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

Call me skeptical but.. Is this real ECC RAM?

 

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1729153-REG/sabrent_sb_dr5u_16gx4_laptop_ddr5_4x16gb_4800mhz.html

 

It says Integrated ECC, but I am suspicious.

I think it is not ECC memory of traditional meaning. Search "DDR5 ECC UDIMM" for real ECC memory for AMD desktop processors, I found some offers from Micron.