Techtonic

Any an all idea's are awesome so please if you have anything posted it up here :-D
 
Ok so my father and I are really needing to build a super server. As it sits he already has a server rack 48U Rack. It has two HP server's and a number of Sans Digital 8 Bay Enclosures. From what I gathered besides wanting to really get away from all the drive enclosures and have everything in one server. He has found that the HP controller card is causing the drives to randomly spin down because it thinks the temperature is too high. He's found on forums that they purposely do this if they are not HP hdd's. So were needing to build a new super server to replace this and make a house for the all the hdd's. As it sits he has 36 hdd's 3.5inch. So the new chassis we really do know this WILL NOT be cheap lol. So there is room for expansion were needing idea's for a 40 to 45 bay hdd server chassis. Also for all the hdd's some help on what kind of card we would need and how many. Because I understand that there are really no SATA cards  where I can slap two of them in and run 35-45 drives off them. Or I could be wrong and you all could help me out with this. I know the motherboard can be talked about later but I do know he want to run an Intel i5 on it. Depending on the room of the chassis and how many controller cards we'll need I'm sure we can gauge which motherboard and CPU would be perfect for this type of server. He's wanting to run a software raid through Windows Server but I'm trying to get him to use drivepool which it's perfect for my 48TB setup.
 
Thanks again for any and all help!!
 
-Aaron

Supermicro cases are the best! 
 
Yes, the 45 drive bay cases are only drives, no actual motherboard. 
 
However, you buy one of these: 
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAD5G5N06260&cm_re=9207-8e-_-2AS-008U-00003-_-Product
Then hook up the enclosure.
 
Or you pick up something like this:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E26-R1K28LPB(which is what I have) 
 
 
 
But honestly, my best suggestion would be to contact SuperMicro directly and talk to a representative.  they may be able to help you out.
 
 
 
 
As for RAID cards, you want HBA stuff, unless you plan on doing RAID.  
As for RAID caching, that's done "on controller", IIRC, and much more expensive. 

Well, I really have 25 drives. 4 are SSDs sitting inside the case (1 SSD for the OS and 3 in a RAID0 for VM storage), one is in a drive dock for backups, and the 20 in hot swap bays are in DrivePool. 9 of my drives are still 3TB and 11 are 6TB. Once I get one more 6TB, I do plan to start a RAID50 and expand it over time as I upgrade the remaining 3TB drives.

I'd recommend something like the CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD.  I have one of these, and it's been fantastic. And it's Active PFC (True Sinewave).  matters if your power supply is as well. 
 
Otherwise, UPS's are expensive across the board. Even on EBay and the like.

Awesome! Now just to talk to Saitoh183 on the forum that know how to setup Snapraid/Drivepool and we'll be good to go. Drashna I'm going to respect Stablebit and not post a thread on asking how to setup a Snap/Dp setup. I have no intentions to drive anyone away from Stablebit products and the awesome support and great community you have here. Thanks everyone for you help!

To answer this, if you have 22TBs of actual data, then if you duplicate it using the normal "x2" duplication, then it will consume 44TBs of space. If you use the x3 duplication, 66TBs. And so on.
 
But that is only if you duplicate everything. Since you can configure duplication settings per folder, this can get very complicated, very fast.  The UI does display how much data is duplicated and unduplicated. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You are very welcome. In case it doesn't show, I really do enjoy helping people.
 
As for FlexRAID, if you decide you don't want it, try contacting them for a refund. (i'm not sure how easy that will be, as I've never had to deal with them). But it's worth at least trying, if you don't want their product.
 
 
As for the SMART data, if you're using USB, you should be in a much better position. From what we've seen, USB bridge chipsets are usually a lot better about relaying SMART data. But that isn't always the case.
However, eSATA is when you start having issues with that. Silicon Image chipsets are atrocious about this. In fact, they only grab the data for the first drive, and either repeat it for all the drives or don't bother displaying it.  Some Marvell eSATA chipsets are bad about SMART data as well. 
 
As for the ProBoxes, those should work fine. Alex (the Developer) has a bunch of the 4 bay ones, so they're tested. However, the only caveat is that you may want to look into buying spare power supplies for them, as they fail frequently. 
 
 
 
 
You're very welcome!
 
And I can definitely understand about the duplication. It's expensive in the terms of disk space (and disk cost). 
Though, Newegg frequently has sales, (and good sales on NAS drives). So it may be worth checking that out. Even if you do go with FlexRAID/SnapRAID.

Techtonic, that's a lot of reading!
 
 
Since ... I'm being a bit lazy here (skimming, and primarily answering you linearly and directly), I apologize if I miss anything. 
 
 
Duplication is a file based mirroring. It means that the software keeps a 1:1 copy of the file on another drive.  This way, if a drive dies, you can remove it from the pool, and StableBit DrivePool will automatically reduplicate the data. 
Duplication can be enabled for the entire pool (by enabling Pool File Duplication), and can be configured per folder. 
 
You can see more details about this here:
http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=File%20Protection
 
 
 
As for Parity, check out this thread:
http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/52-faq-parity-and-duplication-and-drivepool/
 
This lists some info about it, and it also lists a number of threads with user created guides on how to configure both pieces of software. However, it's not officially supported (but plenty of users have had good success). 
 
Honestly, I'm not really a fan of parity for ... a number of reasons. So I really don't have a huge amount of experience with FlexRAID nor SnapRAID. 
 
 
 
 
 
And as for space usage, the duplication uses double (or whatever the "x" is) space on the system. That's because it's storing everything as normal files on multiple hard drives. And yes, this definitely takes up more space than parity. 
 
 
 
 
As for fdt's issue with SMART data, this is (IIRC) due to the chipset used. Not all chipsets are created equal, and some don't properly pass on SMART data.  Silicon Image based chipsets are this way, and there is nothing that we can do about it. 
 
 
 
 
 
If I missed anything, or you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Glad to hear it!

Thank you Sir now it works exactly like I wanted.

Yes, absolutely.
 
However, you may want to uncheck the "Unlesss drive is being emptied" option on the "Settings" tab for the balancers.
 
Also, you may want to disable all of the other balancers when using the SSD Optimizer, or it can cause issues.

Hi,
 
From my past experience of FlexRaid user, I think FlexRaid is not reliable enough. Reading the forums, there are still too many issues when trying to restore a failed drive, whatever the reasons are (update of the parity drive not done or failed, disk errors, etc...). I lost 700+GB of data, all recovered files were corrupted and it took ages to recover these corrupted files. No error during the last update during the parity, etc... I was using FlexRaid with HD Sentinel.
This is my own experience. It might work perfectly well for other users - even if I am wondering how many people already tried to restore a 6TB drive to check if everything is ok.
 
So I decided to sacrifice hard drive space in order to be sure that my files are protected and that I can recover them without any issue and not waiting for x days: I moved to DrivePool and Scanner. I am pretty satisfied until now even if I have some small issues with Scanner (some of my drives are not recognized). But I like the integration of these 2 tools (files placement rule based on Scanner).

It is possible, and we are aware of how to do so.  
 
However, this is a significant change, and requires testing before it can even be released.
 
Additionally, Alex is busy finishing up StableBit CloudDrive, and once that's released, we do plan on going through StableBit DrivePool and StableBit Scanner, fixing bugs and going through feature requests (such as this). 

Well, the surface scans still work, at least. 
 
The big issue here is how to display both the "logical" disks displayed (the storage space), and the individual disks, as well. 
And that's even considering if all the same information about the disks is provided.  So this is a complicated request.