HL 15 - Workstation & Shared Data storage

Hardware
2

  1. Has anyone tested a similar setup? What was the performance of the shared folder?
    The shared folder performance will likely be limited by the 10GBase-T LAN connections on your mobo. IE, a proper RAID setup should be able to saturate that.

  2. Is RAID 5 a good idea for 15 SATA SSDs?
    This depends entirely on your use case. What workload is being done on the SSDs? What is your tolerance for write performance vs redundancy? RAID 0, 10, or 6 might be better options depending on the workload.

  3. If the OS crashes, will I be able to rebuild the RAID on a new OS without losing data?
    Why BTRFS and not ZFS? Either way, if the OS is what crashes, you should be able to mount the disks on a system running equal or newer versions of your OS and filesystem. You won’t necessarily need to rebuild the RAID.

  4. If I install SMB, will I need to do anything special to ensure compatibility with Mac & Windows? Is it difficult to enable SMB multichannel? (I have 2x 10GbE ports and would like to use both for transfers.)
    I don’t know what they are off the top of my head, but I think you will likely have to do some commands specific to setting up the share for Mac access. SMB’s origin is as a Windows protocol.

  5. Is there an option to add even more SATA SSDs in an HL 15? I would love to add many more.
    See here for a 6-bay caddy that mounts to the inside back of the chassis. Of course you need to cable up your own SATA data and power connectors. There have been a few other versions of that posted on the forum, If you are really serious, 45Drives has SSD-specific backplanes and servers. Remember you will need some way to secure the drives from falling over if the unit is bumped, the default cage is intended to hold 3.5 inch drives. You might want to follow this thread.

  6. What potential problems might occur?
    A 9600-16i is overkill if all you are dealing with is SATA drives. All you really need is a 930x-16i. I mean, it’ll work, but don’t think you’re going to get some speed boost over earlier HBAs when SATA is your baseline. HBAs typically want at least an electrical x8 alot. It seems like you’d probably have that, but should confirm.

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