Hello I am new here been reading around thought I'd join and ask a few questions.

Big request, I am after a Motherboard that I can use as a HTPC, File Server and possibly use for encoding video (grueling process on your CPU). If this is a ridiculous expectation tell me now.

I want something reasonable, (not a ridiculously large motherboard with 24 Ram slots) just something with enough PCI/PCI-e slots to have a video card possibly Two raid controllers and a TV Tuner card (for the HTPC aspect) Dual or single CPU socket, 775 or 1366. Encoding would be super fast with Two CPU's, but you can't have everything. This bad boy could be running up to 40 HDD's

Does anybody know of anything that might fit that criteria? I like my Intel CPU's, however I have heard that AMD's are better for File servers, but no one has given a reason why they think this. If you know please let me know

Also if you know anything about SAS cards please fill me in, I haven't really looked into them much but on the weekend I saw a bloke who had one which had 4 cables running from it powering 4 hard drives each. I cant find very much on the net about it and how it is done, if you know anymore please fill me in

Thanks in advance.
Rhys

If I were you I'd build 2 systems...

An HTPC doesn't need to be particularly fast and HTPC cases are usually poorly ventalated because they are meant to be quiet. They can get away with this because the hardest thing they will likely ever do is stream HD video from the web or play a DVD. But you are saying you also need the ability to handle large numbers of hard drives (up to 40!?) and need a powerful CPU for video encoding... (you'll probably need a large 5 or 6U server case for something like that) not something I would want in my living room and will probably be as loud as a vaccum cleaner.

so.. my advice is to build a HTPC around a mid to lower end core 2 duo or Athlon II X2 and a Radeon 4350 or 4550 (with a HDMI output) give it just enough hard drive and stream everything over a network with your file server.

for your file server / encoding box get yourself a big hardcore server case, a Core i7 8xx and a high end P55 board, run a PCI video card so you can use the PCIe slots for your RAID controllers and you should be set.

Sorry i should have been more specific I have a case in mind the Mountain Mod Extended Ascension, it is capable of holding up to 40 HDD's I run my PC very close to my TV so i was thinking of running two PC's in the one case, my regular gaming PC, and have a second motherboard (the case supports it) and use it for a file server HTPC, and It would be GREAT if I could get one with enough power to encode film.

So the question is the room isn't an issue, I just want to know what Hardware would do the job, especially the Motherboard SAS card etc.. I was looking at the P55 I have one at the moment, But i see some other boards like Tyan which have motherboards with multiple CPU sockets and 8 onboard SAS ports (which i believe are capable of powering 4 sata drives each correct me if i am wrong) for cheaper than a high end p55 board. Could someone please tell me the benefits/disadvantages of using something like that for a file server?

why not do this?

Drop in a P55 board (preferably Gigabyte or ASUS) that has the ability to run RAID 5 and an 8xx series Core i7. For your drives run 3 or 4 1TB drives in a RAID 5 array for storage then use a Radeon 4350/4550 that has an HDMI port on it to connect to your TV?

That is similar to what I am doing at the moment, I am looking at a system that is capable of expanding up to 36 HDD's of pure storage.

just out of curiosity what do you need to store that is going to take 36 drives? what are you backing up? the internet?

A lot of high def content and A lot of video editing stuff. I want to design a system that I will be able to upgrade rather than replace every year or two.

Thats pretty much going to be any system you build yourself.

Could someone please explain to me exactly how the SAS ports on one of those motherboards would work, Can or can you not connect up to 4 SATA hard drives on one SAS Port?

Yes, some SAS controllers should allow you to hook 4 SATA drives to a single SAS port
You require a splitter
http://tinyurl.com/ylbw6lc
Only thing I'm not sure on is SAS uses a higher signalling voltage than SATA not sure if the drives can handle it, but i'd imagine so without looking into it.
SAS also uses TCQ rather than NCQ of SATA it will end in a loss of functionality basically
Also having said the above really go research it incase i'm wrong could be a costly mistake also why not just use SATA raid for what it was designed for?

Id also like to point out I have 3 HDD's in a 1U case cooled by 2x 120mm fans they are hitting 50oC+ when span up more than an hour, you throw 20 in there stacked one on top of another its going to get HOT and need some serious cooling to prevent drives failing or at least a shorter life

It may be worth you looking into a dedicated NAS to put in another room or cupboard
http://tinyurl.com/ykozc4p
and having a quiet HTPC for the living room.......

PS.... If you have this much money might I suggest donating to the Shawn fund I promise it will be going to good use....

PS. Bungle is right anything you build this year in two years is going to be pretty much obsolete... we were gawping at Athlon 64 a few years ago now were blazing away on i7 and I don't see progress slowing down much

PPS! That also goes for spending £400 on a motherboard today that isn't going to use the same socket as a new processor out in two years time forcing you into a total upgrade again

They will be used for storage only so they wont be working all the time and they will be cooled well. I dont want to go SATA Raid because they dont offer enough ports unless you buy a 3 grand card, if i can get these SAS ports built in on a motherboard it would save alot, however I think those cables require backplates to work, ive seen it done with a standard SAS port looks similar to a SATA splitting to 4 HDD's. Maybe this only allows reading from 1 HDD at a time but that is all I am after. I didn't get to ask the guy who I saw with it how it was done but I know they were SAS ports and I know the plug attaching to the card wasnt a huge plug like the one you linked.. NAS servers would be a lot more pricey than my proposed method

If you're really serious about this you need to buy a stand alone RAID card The reason being is that you can migrate your RAID arrays from one system board to another... If you're using onboard those drives are "married" to your onboard RAID controller (that model anyway)... as soon as upgrade your motherboard (which very likely will have a different RAID controller) you can kiss your data good bye.

Ok, Say RAID is out for the moment and I want to run all these drives as JBOD drives, could I simply use these cables

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/258404115/New_Mini_SAS_to_4_...Cable.html

to run from the SAS port on the Mobo to 4 HDD's?

Would this work or would it not?

Also I see MiniSAS and SAS, what is the difference? I see cables with fat 24 pin connectors, then I see motherboards claiming to have your standard SAS connectors, and they look no bigger than a SATA port? What is the go there?

Why don't you buy something with a large number of SATA ports on it like this:
This thing will run 10 SATA Drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128362

Then just upgrade your hard drives as your space needs require? You could load it out with say.... 5x 2TB drives to get your started... Thats 10TB of storage. Then next year when a 3 or 4 TB drives becomes available if space becomes an issue drop in a couple of those... Keep this process going and when you run out of drive controllers retire the small drives and replace them with larger ones... By then you'll likely be swapping out the 2TB drives for 6 or 8TB drives.

most boards you will find will not have onboard sas. the only ones i have seen are intel, supermicro and tyan, maybe a few high end asus server boards. all of these boards are server boards.
for performance purposes i would also recommend a dedicated raid card. onboard controller will not perform as well in any scenario.

i would go with the evga p55 classified 200 and pair it with intel i7 860. with hyper-threading that will give you 8 consecutive executions.
the evga board will give you 6 pci-e slots to play with. which is enough for 2 vid's in sli or crossfire, 2-3 slots for raid controller and still have one to spare for pci-e tv tuner or drop one raid controller and throw in a sound card.

sas drives are very fast but they are also very expensive, power hungry and usually small in capacity. imo a performance advantage that small does not justify the price of sas drives.
if you really want to go beyond the performance of sata then i would go with ssd's

a decent raid controller can make a world of a difference. i am sworn in on areca's, although the new lsi cards are also screaming fast. a few areca controllers i could recommend are:
areca ARC-1680i PCI-E x8 SAS PCIe
areca ARC-1680IX-24-2G PCI-Express x8 SAS
these two are actually sas cards and require an adapter
areca ARC-1280ML PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card
this card accommodates 24 sata drives

Yes they raid cards are nice, but very expensive. Say all my data was mirrored on another computer that would make raid not as important, would the 8x SAS ports on some of the Tyan and Supermicro motherboards run 4 HDD's each in JBOD using the 4 port connector cables? I am not after actual SAS drives, just the ports because they can accomodate 4 SATA Drives each, rather than buying a ridiculous amount of SATA Raid cards.

Switching and updating HDDs seems like a waste to me Id rather have a system where I can just keep throwing them in, by the time ive filled my ports Petabyte drives will probably be out..

I know this wouldn't be as a wise as a RAID card, I just want to know all my options.
Thanks for all your help so far.

you will be hard pressed to find a board with more then 10 onboard ports, sas or sata.
the 1280ml is a great card and actually also runs with multilane connection.
if you look at the card it has 6 multilane ports on the back which each support 4 drives for a total of 24 drives. with 2 of those you could have 48 drives. which is what you wanted.
no they are not cheap
i am not sure what you actually trying to achieve with the raid. could you be a little bit more specific? is it just simple storage and not performance bound and/or redundancy is not paramount?

BoT said:

It sounds to me like he is more concearned with the number of drives he can attach than anything else...

This setup will be strictly for Storage. Speed is not a factor I am worried about because I will only be accessing 1 Drive at a time when streaming content.

I will most likely make the investment and go with the RAID card setup anyway, but I still want to know my options with setting up a Non RAID group of disks using a Supermicro/Tyan Motherboard, (There are several that have 8 SAS ports and a further 6 SATA ports on them, which if each SAS port holds 4 HDD's like I have been led to believe would support 38 HDD's in total). Also, can someone please explain to me MiniSAS and SAS? What is the difference? I see motherboards claiming to have MiniSAS and others claiming to have SAS and they both look to have identical ports?

I understand setting up a RAID on a motherboard would be unwise so if i went for the RAID setup I would definitely use a card or two.

Rhys Callender said:

The number of drives that can be run off a SAS port is going to be determined by the SAS controller being used.



what is a waste is trying to get a system that can handle 40+ hard drives...

You need to figure out how much space you need... overshoot it a bit and get what will work now. In 3 or 4 years all these drives will need to be replaced anyway, mechanical drives do not last forever they only run so long before the motor wears out and you lose everything. If 10TB will get you by for now run that for 2 or 3 years then replace the whole mess with a couple new drives that will be as big or bigger than the 5 or 6 drives it will take to meet your storage needs today.

Has anybody thought about what happens if he runs out of drive letters? Can windows even manage more than 26 drives?