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HOW-TO: SAS Storage Systems

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slipstreamelectronics

Posted: Sunday, February 14, 2010 8:35:01 AM

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HOW-TO: SAS Storage Systems

This is a guide to introduce and explain SAS "Serial Attached SCSI" storage systems and how this can be used in conjunction with My Movies as an extremely versatile and expandable storage system.

SCSI has been around for quite a long time, but not until recently has it become a cost effective and versatile solution to store data. Older versions of SCSI used a flat ribbon cable similar to PATA to jump drive to drive to for a chain of drives that could be used for storage. That method was very expensive because of the equipment needed and also its uniqueness. Not until the form of SCSI known as SAS came out that it made the equipment more adaptable to a more broad range of uses.

SAS for lack of a better word is SATA that is expandable. In basic SATA application you are restricted to the use of one drive per port, with SAS you no longer have this limit.

Now with SAS, there are two types of drive that interface. You can use SAS drives or SATA drives, SATA drives are backwards compatible with SAS controllers. SAS drives on the other hand can only be used with SAS controller; it can NOT be hooked up to a SATA port on a controller card or a motherboard. SAS drives tend to be used for high load storage system and are also higher performance then standard SATA drives. But on the down side SAS drive cost much more than a typical SATA drive.

SAS HARDWARE.

#1. Controller Card.

Controller cards come in two types; they come as an HBA "Host Bus Adapter" card which controls drives by themselves, no raid. Then there is RAID controller cards, now with raid cards most come with a huge selection of types of raids, but they also come with JBOD feature which is the same thing that a HBA does. Controller cards for SAS do not use traditional ports like SATA cards use; instead they have a connector which is 4 ports in 1. These connectors come in a couple different types, mainly one for internal use "inside the case" and external use "from case to case". I will explain the different types of cables later. SAS controllers will come in many port configurations; can be just one port which can direct connect to 4 SAS or SATA drives all the way up to 6 port cards that can direct connect to 24 drives. The great thing about SAS is even if you get a one port card it can control as many ports as the card can handle, in most cases controller cards can control 128/256 end drives. This can be achieved via SAS expanders.

#2. Expanders.

This device is what makes SAS great. It takes one SAS port and turns it into as many as you need or as many as the controller card can handle. Early in SAS there where two types of expanders, Edge and Fan-out. Older versions of SAS you had to use one edge expander with the controller card which could control up to 255 end drives, or if you wanted to use more than one edge expander you needed to use a fan-out expander, which controls up to 255 edge expanders. With SAS 2.0 they eliminated this down to one type of expander which could perform both functions.
There are generally 2 flavors of expander, you have the host expander "left" which resides in the case with the controller card and generally uses an empty PCI slot. There are also secondary expanders "right" which allow you to run a case standalone with just the expander, power supply, case and hard drives, no computer system required. With this type of expander you can create WILD configurations with case and drive combinations.

#3. Cables.
There are many types of cables; I’m only going to cover the few that are mainly used in most configurations.
#1. 8087 Cable. This cable is the most common connection used from device to device. This cable is only used for internal connections.

#2. 8087 Fan-out Cable. This cable is used to go from a standard 8087 port and span out to 4 SATA connections.

#3. 8088 Cable. This cable goes from an external port on controller card, expander, and port adapter to another expander.

#4. 8087 to 8088 Adapter. This is used sometimes because certain controller cards don’t have external ports.

CONFIGURATIONS.

This shows how SAS can be configured.

This is another configuration if you don’t want to have an expander in the first case.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.

Another great thing is that SAS system can run full speed to all drives at the same time, vs. other system that share bandwidth between drives. That means say you have a standard HDD hooked on to a SATA port on your motherboard, you might get 40-80 MB/s throughput on the drive. Even if you raid 4 of these drives in raid 0 you might double the speed or so, But with SAS you get full speed per channel, that means if you raid say 4 of these drives you will get full 320MB/s vs. maybe 160MB/s. The reason this is SATA is designed to work at only half duplex, which means it has one channel for sending and receiving data, SAS system run on full duplex which means they have separate channels for sending and receiving. I have been able to raid 16 drives in 0 and got an amazing 1280MB/s throughput to the motherboard, better yet some of these drive where not even in the same case!!

Now looking into the future, SAS technologies are always double the speed of existing SATA, so there is always plenty of room to grow with system. Right now as of this post we have SATA2 which is capable of speeds of 3.0Gbps; SAS right now can run 6.0Gbps. So that mean when sata3 comes out your SAS system will already be able to handle those new speeds!

Just to give you an idea of the expandability of SAS, let’s say you controller card can control 256 drives, so you have 256 1TB drive equivalent to 256TB. Well that’s a lot of space huh? ok, but what if you add 3 more controller cards, you have the ability to control 1024 drives giving you a whopping 1.0PB, THATS RIGHT petabyte or 1024TB. Now that of course is an extreme layout of SAS but it is possible.

So I hope this guide has shown you that SAS is just about the most adaptable and expandable storage system out there, and the speed is un-matched. If you have any questions about these configurations or equipment used please feel free to pm me or email me. The expanders can be a bit hard to find some time; if you need help finding them I can point you in the right direction!

Equipment used in this layout is, Adaptec 5405, Chenbro CK13601, Chenbro UEK-13601, Adaptec Cables, Generic 8087 to 8088 Adapter.

My Movie Collection
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I Have all Adaptec and Chenbro SAS parts in stock, contact me if you need any of them!

Server- Intel D5400XS Skull Trail, 2x Intel Quad Core E5340, 32GB Kingston FB-DIMM, PNY GT520, Norco RPC-4116 4U Chasis, Adaptec 6405 SAS Card, Chenbro CK22803 6.0Gbps Expander, 16 1TB Western Digital Drives, WHS2011
Expander 1 - Norco RPC-4220 20SAS Hot-Swap Case, Enermax Galaxy DXX, Chenbro UEK-23601 6.0Gbps Expander 20 2TB Western Digital Drives.
Expander 2 - Norco RPC-4220 20SAS Hot-Swap Case, Enermax Galaxy DXX, Chenbro UEK-23601 6.0Gbps Expander 20 2TB Western Digital Drives.
Clients 1-6 **NEW** -Intel DP67DE Mobo, Corei5 2300 Cpu, 4GB Hyper X Ram, 64Gb SSD Hard Drive, PNY GT520 3D, Windows 7 Home Premium, Arcsoft TMT3 w/ SimHD, Sim3D.

ericgagne

Posted: Sunday, February 14, 2010 4:09:15 PM

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Good post.

I was getting ready to expand my storage with a 5 Bay SANS Digital eSata enclosure but I think I'm gonna redo the work and see if SAS would be a better solution.

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HTPC: Asus M2NPV-VM Deluxe, Athlon X2 64 5000+ 2.6GHz, 3 GB DDR2-667, Asus Radeon HD4350, , Windows 7 Ultimate, Antec Fusion.

Backups, backups, backups..................once a day and always before upgrading.......backups, backups....................................did I mention backups ?

slipstreamelectronics

Posted: Sunday, February 14, 2010 11:50:39 PM

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ericgagne wrote:

Good post.

I was getting ready to expand my storage with a 5 Bay SANS Digital eSata enclosure but I think I'm gonna redo the work and see if SAS would be a better solution.

let me know if you need any help! Wink

jedennings

Posted: Friday, February 19, 2010 5:19:40 PM

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Great topic, very good narrative supported with pictures and diagrams! An additional question - how well does SAS play with WHS? The assumption is that the system would see these drives and add them to the overall storage pool, but I've not been able to find anything in the WHS forums to specifically validate that. And I'm guessing that it just gets better with Vail...

Also, any pointers to the best and/or cost effective hardware components? Thx!

slipstreamelectronics

Posted: Saturday, February 20, 2010 1:39:50 PM

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jedennings wrote:

SAS is new tech to the home theater market, this is an enterprise level solution that we have researched and adapted to be used with home servers and movie aplications. sas plays with whs as any raid card would, as long as os has right drivers then you should be fine and they should be able to be added to the drive pool. All of are servers use desktop operating systems, i.e. vista business, 7 professional, etc. we have had the best experince with those, we are currently testing the whs aplication and will be updating this post as soon as we get results. For parts what i have listed in the thread are what we use in most setup's and is also very cost effective, the only parts you might have a hard time finding is the expanders, which we can get for you if you so choose.

r1budha

Posted: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 3:08:24 AM

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you would not want to use one of these SAS setups with WHS at all, unless you are merely passing through all the drives.
the problem with doing that is you lose the speed bonus of SAS.

Just like you do not want to use a RAID setup with WHS.

WHS has it's own way of creating a drive pool which in essence is drive spanning.
meaning it fills one drive then moves to the next drive in sequence.
this is why it's easy to add drives to the "pool", it simply tacks them onto the end of the current drive chain.

as an example:

|--Drive1-500gb--|------Drive2-1000GB------| etc

add another 500GB drive and it becomes:
|--Drive1-500gb--|------Drive2-1000GB------|--Drive3-500GB--| etc

running this type of setup over RAID of any kind is merely asking for trouble.
the reason is if any one drive fails, you'll lose everything as now you spanned drives will be striped across multiple drives and you are asking a RAID card to know where data is that WHS will move around since WHS will also "optimize" drives during down time.

there are several websites citing the problem of running WHS over RAID already.

if you want to do that, you ARE risking your data.

Also, since WHS is only basically ever reading from one drive in the "pool", there's no need for the speed anyway (actually there's no need for the speed in any home setup, but thats another argument)

a better solution would be to just either run Win7 Pro or ultimate as they have no file sharing restrictions, or to run one of the windows server OS's if you are attached to windows solutions. You can get Server 2003R2 for the same money as WHS easily. (and that's what WHS is built on anyway which you can see if you RDP into your WHS box)

another problem i have with large arrays for home use is spin up time versus energy savings.

if you make an array of say 20 drives, and you want them to spin down to save on electricity as well as allow for less cooling to be running all the time (again energy savings), whenever you want to actually watch a movie, you have to wait for all 20 drives to spin up.
since most PSU's aren't going to handle that type of surge at all, most controllers allow for staggered spin up of the drives, which take approximately 5-10 seconds per drive. so take 5 seconds times 20 drives and its a nearly two minutes of spin up time, 10 seconds is even longer.
no throw in that some drives like to park their heads (green drives from WD being one) and suddenly that spin up time can double again......

makes fo an awful long wait just to start watching you movie.

it's noticeable to me with a four drive array with staggered spin-up, a 20 drive array would be murder on WAF.

r1budha

Posted: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 3:22:17 AM

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Also this statement:

Quote:

The great thing about SAS is even if you get a one port card it can control as many ports as the card can handle, in most cases controller cards can control 128/256 end drives. This can be achieved via SAS expanders.

is misleading in that the single biggest limiter will be the speed you can achieve via the PCIe slot you put the card into.

using a PCIe x1 card to control 128 drives, which would in theory work, will be so slow it isnt worth it at all.

you need to match the number of drives to the card slot based upon the bandwidth available per channel in PCIe which is 500MB/s
this is why larger cards move from PCIe x1 to x4 and to x8
it's also why you dont see a lot of single controller 48 drive cards.
the bandwidth of the drives far exceeds the bandwidth of the interface at that point.

since a decent sata drive will read and write at 75MB/s in large chunks (like a dvd iso) you can plainly see that running these expanders isnt done much in the enterprise level because the bandwidth is limited by the card.
thats why a good sas SAN will have multiple controllers and a fiber backplane.

all of that is really moot when taken to a home setup though as the total bandwidth needed is so low in this type of application.

after all, streaming to 4 different front ends can easily be accomplished with a 4 drive array that is managed by windows software raid striping.
i know, i do it all the time.

chriss

Posted: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 10:46:43 AM

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Hi Guys,

The posts from Slipstream were very detailed and it seemed to be a great way of designing a very expandable server system.

However the recent posts from r1budha, seem to contadict quite a lot of Slipstreams info, without really proposing a good way forward for WHS with an easily expandable storage methodology.

I am keen to build a WHS server, initialy with 8 or 16 drives in a single box with the potential to add a further box with additional drives as my collection grows.

I have read quite a lot on the WHS and Raid arguments and I am going to go with Folder duplication rather than Raid as I want an easy life and HDD storage is only going to get cheaper.

However I am now very confused as to which technology to use without creating potential bottlenecks.

Are there any other server experts here who could advise on the most appropriate server technology for video streaming applications to multiple clients (upto 10)

Thanks

slipstreamelectronics

Posted: Thursday, March 18, 2010 8:04:13 AM

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r1budha wrote:

i do agree with most of what you say, and as our tests have shown using a hba with drive expander setup works great with whs.

And if you do the math most new power supplies are heavy on the wattage size, we have NEVER had problems spinning up even spinning up20 drives at once, my home system is is running off of a 600 watt psu, spins up just fine.
That is why we dont use whs, on any other os except for a array only the drive needed spins up, and even in an array maybe 4 drives still does not take that long, 1-2 sec at the most..

and as of my last post i stated that most of our systems use win7 pro, or similar, we do not use whs for a server we sell.... period

r1budha wrote:

Also this statement:

Quote:

whoa...... hold up man, first of all any of the equipment i have listed here uses a minimum of a 4x pcie slot. I have not seen a sas hba or raid card that uses a pcie 1x slot that can run that many drives. I think you mis understood what i said, a one port card is 1 8087/8088 port not a 1x pci slot. so a 4x card according to your math is 2000MB/s which is 26 drives at one time. so how is that misleading?? That one port can handle 24gbps each sas lane is 6gbps and there are 4 lanes in each 8087 or 8088 connection. I hate to say this but you would be wrong in the that most enterprise lvl systems dont use these, MANY data farms use sas expansion systems for data storage. I did not post this for performance and speed reasons, i posted this as a way to keep increasing you storage. And the last thing, WHY on earth are you using software raid, that is the worst thing do do out of all the things you have said, os has a problem, poof... all data is gone. Again this was not ment to be a performance thing, it is a side effect but it was meant to be a way to keep expanding a persons storage system..

slipstreamelectronics

Posted: Thursday, March 18, 2010 8:11:06 AM

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chriss wrote:

well first, sas does work just fine for whs, just not as a raid setup, you can still use a hba "non raid card" and it works just fine. If your looking an expandable solution, I suggest against whs, to many limits. Our test whs had enough through put to stream HD to 14 clients, so i think you 10 would not be a problem, most of what r1budha said has no bearing on this type of a setup, spin up power....lol, not a problem, throughput....not a problem, only this that is some what a problem is raid, but if you are not going to use it then not a problem, and hba cards are cheaper then raid cards so a plus you save some money, but personally i would take raid any time over folder duplication.

wordgasm

Posted: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 12:49:48 AM

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Slip

You seem to be the go to for SAS... and I'm confused and out of Google search ideas!

I've got a 2u Norco hotswap Home brew server. And a Norco hot swap 10 bay for my HTPC.

I bought a HD CARD SUPERMICRO|AOC-SAT2-MV8 R I was hoping to connect 8 drives in the HTPC case to a SAS Centronix device via a cable to a SAS Centronix device (with a low profile bracket) to the 2U serverI found on PCPitStop. They say no low profile. I can use the HD CARD SUPERMICRO|AOC-SAT2-MV8 R, within the server itself for the 8 drives on the server, but how can I get the 8 drives in the HTPC case hooked up to the 2u server without spending $600.00 on a card.

Everything is rack mounted and I wanted to go SAS to have a cable disconnect between the 2 boxes if I have to pull one from the rack

Any help appreciated!

Thanks

Jeff

slipstreamelectronics

Posted: Sunday, April 25, 2010 10:04:39 PM

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wordgasm wrote:

sorry it took so long to get back, been gone out of town for a while on business..

you need this ..
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816103095&cm_re=adaptec_1045-_-16-103-095-_-Product

and one of these which i can get for you.

http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?sku=76
you need the chenbro uek-ck12803, that will allow you to run up to 16 hdd in you storage case, once that is full you can just add another case and so on up to the limit of the HBA card which is 128 drives. both of these will cost about $400

asb987

Posted: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 9:12:02 PM

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Any idea where to find a chenbro uek-ck13601? I have a norco 4020 case that I would like to install this expander in. I have been searching high and low and can't seem to find anyone that has this in stock anywhere.

wordgasm

Posted: Friday, April 30, 2010 1:16:12 AM

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slipstreamelectronics wrote:

wordgasm wrote:

Thanks for the response .... I did my usual impatient and found e-sata multipliers and bought those and associated .. they will be here tomorrow...... I'm never pulling more than a bluray or HD TV at once so should be okay (I hope) if not ...... I'll be back for your solution and for sure for the next expansion case

Thanks Again

Jeff

slipstreamelectronics

Posted: Friday, April 30, 2010 4:30:31 AM

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asb987 wrote:

ASB987, i can get them for you, i am a chenbro distributor, give me a call 9162478700

rajt2165

Posted: Friday, January 14, 2011 10:03:05 PM

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slipstreamelectronics,
I am planning on building a storage server. I have a question regarding RAID card & SAS expander. If I purchase a Adaptec RAID card with two or more port SAS ports (for example 5445), can I connect one port from 5445 to Chenbro SAS expander and the other one from 5445 to 4 SATA drives?
Thanks in advance. BTW, do you have a website?
-Raj

slipstreamelectronics

Posted: Friday, January 14, 2011 11:00:51 PM

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Raj, give me a call and i can walk you through this, my website is being built.

tvance

Posted: Monday, May 16, 2011 4:13:06 AM

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Sup MM members! I have begun a transistion from the TR8M-BP esata towers to an SAS/DAS storage solution. This will be done utilizing the Areca ARC-1880ix SAS RAID card and 2 NORCO DS-24E expanders. the goal is 80TB in a single storage volume on WHSv1. The OS will reside on a 3x500GB RAID5 in slot 1,2,3 in the first expander. The data volume will consist of 45 2TB WD20EVDS Drives. Obviously this storage volume will not be added to the storage pool and will be use exclusively by MyMovies.

First Notes:) you of course are required to use a GPT partion type but you must select a 64KB cluster size while formating to NTFS. Also when creating the RAID6 data array, select 64Bit LBA.

Updates to follow, it will take several days for the array to complete initializing.

Robocopy is our friend :)

slipstreamelectronics

Posted: Tuesday, May 17, 2011 12:30:35 AM

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Good luck with that on v1.

keyvan

Posted: Thursday, August 25, 2011 3:32:05 PM

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I am currently using unRaid Pro (13x 2Tb = 24Tb) in a 20 bay rackmount case (Norco) with MM running on a SFF WHS server. This was after I gave up on WHS for large scale disk storage as whenever the DE/Migrater process kicked in (which was random...) HD streaming became very choppy with frequent freezing. I now keep all the movies on the unraid box with WHS acting as the collection manager.
Since WHS 2011 has done away with DE and drive pooling, I have been considering a hardware based raid SAS solution so that I can merge/repalce the 2 boxes with one. Under whs I could then use the auto rip feature of MM for WHS, specially the rip to iso feature for blurays which can only copy to a local drive (I believe this an AnyDVD* limitation) - currently I rip the BD .iso's on my desktop pc and copy and manually add them to CM.
My question is to do with RAID 5 capability and SAS expanders.
Sorry if this sounds dumb, but I am still unclear if the RAID 5 can be applied to / used on the drives connected the RAID controller using an external port of a controller, say like the LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS/SATA Controller MRSAS9280-16I4E. This is a 20 port RAID 0/1/5/6 controller with 4x4 internal ports and 1x 8088 external port. The idea being that initially I would run 2x 8 disk raid 5 arrays (using the 4 internal 8087 ports = 28Tb) and later when more storage is needed use the 8088 external to connect to another rack case with a sas expander. My question is will I be able to build raid 5 arrays with drives connected via the expander or will they just be presented as jbod and not subject to inclusion in raid arrays managed by the host controller in the main (WHS) box?
I do want some protection, hence the raid 5 selection. I am thinking 1 redundant disk per 8 hdu array is a fair trade off between space/cost Vs the possibility of failure and lost data.
Having looked at the LSI and other H/W based raid 5 cards, it appears each array needs to be configured with the final number of disks at build time. This is in contrast with unraid where single disks can be added to the arrays as and when needed - but with drive costs falling this is less of an issue when expanding capacity. So I guess I would expand 14Tb at a time (8x 2Tb - 1x 2Tb=14Tb). This does however become a bit more expensive if for each array I would need a 8 port or bigger H/W raid card.
Any advice would be most appreciated.
Thanks

_{* Installing and/or using AnyDVD is illegal in some countries. Users are themselves responsible for complying with local law when installing and using AnyDVD.}

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