Intel or AMD for Media Server

[Rudimental]

Sorry for the confusion, the Port Multiplier is in the DAS box, and you are looking at around 2K for a 4/5 port DAS, but it has a number of advantages. I just suggested it, and you can find the DAS boxes pretty easily here, e.g. Lian-Li EX 50.

 

[Mars]

Port multipliers are incredibly poorly supported, they are expensive and unavailable in SA.

@OP: Do you need more than 6 SATA ports? What kind of RAID cards are you using anyway and what kind of RAID are you running?

I need 6. those are for all my non raid drives and eSata. Then I have an Adaptec 1430SA Cards that will be running Raid 5 with 4 2TB drives. I have another one of those cards that I hope to have a second array of four 2tb drives running by the end of the year.

 

[Gnome]

I need 6. those are for all my non raid drives and eSata. Then I have an Adaptec 1430SA Cards that will be running Raid 5 with 4 2TB drives. I have another one of those cards that I hope to have a second array of four 2tb drives running by the end of the year.

Well that adapter is a fake RAID controller. Technically you could do 6x2TB and you'd have just 2TB less than your "dream" setup. Some of the Intel boards have onboard RAID 5 (fake RAID also). I was fairly impressed by the Intel Storage Matrix utility, although it didn't seem to want to work properly without RAID edition drives (I created a scenario with bad sectors and it dumped the drive from the array because the drive doesn't have time limited error recovery). You should check that your Adaptec cards can actually run without TLER also, else you are under a delusion if you believe you have any kind of protection. It is actually worse if the adapter needs TLER because a drive is dumped after it hits the first bad sector, so if 2 drives both just have 1 bad sector it's bye bye data.

EDIT: That adapter say it only supports RAID 0, 1, 10, and JBOD. How do you do RAID 5?

 

[Mars]

Well that adapter is a fake RAID controller. Technically you could do 6x2TB and you'd have just 2TB less than your "dream" setup. Some of the Intel boards have onboard RAID 5 (fake RAID also). I was fairly impressed by the Intel Storage Matrix utility, although it didn't seem to want to work properly without RAID edition drives (I created a scenario with bad sectors and it dumped the drive from the array because the drive doesn't have time limited error recovery). You should check that your Adaptec cards can actually run without TLER also, else you are under a delusion if you believe you have any kind of protection. It is actually worse if the adapter needs TLER because a drive is dumped after it hits the first bad sector, so if 2 drives both just have 1 bad sector it's bye bye data.

EDIT: That adapter say it only supports RAID 0, 1, 10, and JBOD. How do you do RAID 5?

Yea I totally forgot about that. I had a RAID 0 with some 1tb drives and now whenI killed the mobo I wanted to change it to raid 5. Slipped my mind that I couldn't with those cards... I guess I will just stick to RAID 0, its not like the data I have is irreplaceable..

I keep all my sensitive/irreplaceable data on the stand alone drives and on my laptop.

I was aware of the fake RAID controller (note I call them RAID cards ).
The overhead should not make a difference in the range of chips I am looking at.

I have decided to go for the AMD setup:

GIGABYTE® 890FXA-UD5:

AMD 890FX Chipset - Socket AM3, 5200MT/s HyperTransport - Supports: AMD Athlon™ II & AMD Phenom™ II
4x DDR3-1800 Slots (Dual Channel), 6x SATA3, 2x SATA2, 2x eSATA/USB Combo, 1xATA133 & FDD, 14xUSB 2.0, 2xUSB 3.0, 3xIEEE1394
4x PCI Express x16 (2x 16/2x 8), 2x PCI Express x1, 1x PCI Slots, Dual Realtek Gigabit LAN, 7.1 Channel HD Audio
Ultra Durable 3 Features: 2oz Copper PCB, 50,000 Hour Solid Capacitors, Ferrite Core Chokes, Low RDS(ON) Mosfets
Dual BIOS™, Dynamic Energy Saver 2, EasyTune, Gigabyte Smart6, ATI Crossfire Support, AutoGreen, XHD, 3x USB Power
Auto Unlock (CPU Core Unlocker), Overclock Alert, Debug LED, Onboard Switches, AMD OverDrive, HybridSilentPipe 2

With

AMD® Athlon™II X2-260 - 3.20GHz Dual Core, Socket AM3, 2MB, HyperTransport Bus, 45nm, AMD64 Support, 3 Year Warranty

 

[robdutchmonkey]

I can never understand why anyone would want to go RAID 0, the cons heavily outweigh the pro's of leaving each drive as a standalone drive. Why a single failure for a slight increase in performance?

 

[Wooden.Spoon]

I can never understand why anyone would want to go RAID 0, the cons heavily outweigh the pro's of leaving each drive as a standalone drive. Why a single failure for a slight increase in performance?

You get roughly double the performance on RAID 0 drives, depending on the RAID controller and the drives.

For example 2 small 'standard' drives (7200rpm) would be cheaper and faster than one Velociraptor (10000rpm) drive of the same size.
Was researching it this morning

 

[robdutchmonkey]

Smaller drives I can understand, but when we're talking about large drives in large quantities (which are in general also more unreliable), it's a different story. Same reason I never ever considered it for myself as an option

 

[Wooden.Spoon]

Large drives in large quantities you would go for backup over speed, hence the other RAID options.
RAID 0 is purely for speed.