SMB Server - advice needed on storage upgrade

tsb910 · Nov 8, 2015

Hello,
Looking for some advice on upgrading our current server at work, just a small business (15-20 employees).
At the moment we have a custom-built desktop type system with an i5-4570, 16GB RAM and 6 x 2GB HDD's attached to the motherboard SATA ports. No RAID or anything, we just robocopy the contents of each HDD to another for backup.
The server runs Server 2012 R2, hosting network shares, a couple of SQL databases and a couple of VM's in VMWare Workstation.
I'd like to upgrade this to some sort of RAID solution for redundancy and performance. However, I'm working with a fairly tight budget, as yet undefined (could probably spend up to say $500 if it was justified, presuming we can reuse the current HDD's).

My questions are as follows:
- should the number one priority be an array for the OS, or for the data?
- is it feasible to have a small array of SSD's, for the database and VM's, for performance?
- can all this be done on one RAID card, at a reasonable cost?
- is software RAID good enough for this sort of scenario?

Appreciate any suggestions.
Thanks
Tony

SuperSoph_WD · Nov 19, 2015

Welcome to the community, Tony!

I'll do my best to answer your questions, however, I'd still need more details about this custom build of yours. What is the model of your motherboard? What is the amount and type of data your small business is tempering with? How big are those files? What kind of RAID do you wish to configure?

- The best performance for such a server would be to use an SSD for the OS and build an array for your data. The booting priority most definitely needs to be set to the SSD. However, in these kinds of configurations, you'd need at least two SATA controllers (1 for the SSD with preferably SATA III ports; and 1 for the HDDs/RAID array with either SATA II or SATA III ports).

- Building a massive RAID configuration like yours with SSDs would be very costly, though. SSDs don't offer massive capacities like mechanical HDDs. Besides, filling SSDs with data will slow its performance dramatically. Another disadvantage would be the constant writing to the SSDs, for example, applications that write temporary files to the solid-state drives constantly. Usually, it's highly recommended to minimize the writing as much as possible to increase the SSD's life.

- As I already mentioned, you'll gain a performance boost if you have an SSD for the OS on a separate SATA controller (as it will need a different SATA mode a.k.a. AHCI) and have another RAID controller for your array (Since the SATA mode there will be RAID).

- Well, one thing about the software RAID that is attractive to users is the fact that it's cost-efficient because it's built into the OS. However, upgrading with a separate RAID card for the array is usually considered a hybrid RAID solution. IMHO, that offers a lot more benefits for your system. Here you can read something very useful on that topic: http://www.adaptec.com/nr/rdonlyres/14b2fd84-f7a0-4ac5-a07a-214123ea3dd6/0/4423_sw_hwraid_10.pdf

I hope I was able to answer your questions thoroughly.
Keep me posted!
SuperSoph_WD

marko55 · Nov 29, 2015

I'm guessing, as you're on LGA1150, you've only got 6 SATA ports on your motherboard. Whether your board supports RAID though, like SuperSoph said, depends on the model & chipset.

But right out of the gate if you were to take the 6 2TB (I'm assuming you meant TB and not GB...) drives and just get them in to a RAID 5 you're going to centralize your storage to one drive presented to the OS and vastly improve the performance for SQL and VMWare. That's assuming that I'm understanding you correctly that you have 6 separate drives that are all being presented to the OS as separate, which would be very painful to manage! Keep in mind, if you intend to put your drives in to a RAID array together they should all be the exact same drive (make, model, everything).

A dedicated RAID card will open up your options greatly, but $500 is going to be very tight (if buying new anyway). If your SQL DB take a lot of IO throughout your day and your VMware environment is quite active, it could be beneficial to get each of their storage sets on to their own arrays so they're not beating up the same disks at the same time. Now you're talking dedicated RAID card (which quite frankly is advised for a small business server that's doing what you're doing...).

If your mobo has the capability to perform the RAID and you're ok with a single array, you would benefit for RST's ability to use the server's RAM as cache. If that's your end route here I'd definitely upgrade the RAM to the (most likely) max of 32GB. Again, this will still be better than what you have today and you would certainly feel the gains in performance.

Having an SSD for an OS/boot drive is always great at home but for a server its not nearly as "necessary." The performance you really want is where your application storage is, which is what you're targeting to get on a RAID array. The main goal for RAID on a server's OS drive is for redundancy much more so than performance.

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