8 port Non-RAID card suggestions?

AMv8(1day)

Weaksauce
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Jan 6, 2011
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126
Hey guys,
I am speccing out a build for a media ripper machine and need an extra 8 ports just for the optical drives. I don't need RAID, I just need full "ATAPI" compatibility and a cheap price.
For background, here's a rough sketchout of my build:

CPU: i7 4765T
MB: BOXDH87RL
RAM: Mushkin Enhanced STEALTH 32 GB (4x8GB) 1600MHz
SSD: mSATA 120 GB Mushkin Enhanced Atlas Series
HDD: x4 Western Digital 250GB 10,000RPM VelociRaptor WD2500BHTZ in RAID 10 for storage
OD: x6 16x DVD-ROM drives (EXAMPLE)
PSU: Roswill Fortress 450W 80+ Platinum


Start off with 6 optical drives and see how the system handles 6 simultaneous rips, then step up 8, most likely with two BD-ROM drives to handle my smaller Blu-ray library.
 
You are using the 500GB as storage for these 8 optical drives? I have a similar setup of 4 DVD and 1 bluray. If you are concerned about video quality you will be surprised at how quickly that space gets eaten up. I'm at about 650 movies and my 4x2TB RAID5 has about 1TB left. But I wanted to make sure that I never see any pixelation in my rips, even in black scenes. So they range anywhere from 3GB to 15GB, with a couple long blurays in the 20+ range. I also make sure each video has both a stereo track and Dolby digital track which adds size.

Are you going to watch these on TV or they are for mobile devices?

EDIT: I didn't see you said ripper machine. I guess these will transfer to another server after ripping? That what I do I read and encode on my main computer, but it actually writes to the server with all the space. Nothing is stored on my main computer. And I've found there to be no noticeable FPS difference between storing locally or sending I sending over CAT5.
 
You might find it easier to just run all the optical drives off the motherboard's ports and sticking the drives on an inexpensive HBA/RAID card for compatibility reasons. You can find a number of relatively cheap rebranded LSI cards that will do the trick.
 
You are using the 500GB as storage for these 8 optical drives? I have a similar setup of 4 DVD and 1 bluray. If you are concerned about video quality you will be surprised at how quickly that space gets eaten up. I'm at about 650 movies and my 4x2TB RAID5 has about 1TB left. But I wanted to make sure that I never see any pixelation in my rips, even in black scenes. So they range anywhere from 3GB to 15GB, with a couple long blurays in the 20+ range. I also make sure each video has both a stereo track and Dolby digital track which adds size.

Are you going to watch these on TV or they are for mobile devices?

EDIT: I didn't see you said ripper machine. I guess these will transfer to another server after ripping? That what I do I read and encode on my main computer, but it actually writes to the server with all the space. Nothing is stored on my main computer. And I've found there to be no noticeable FPS difference between storing locally or sending I sending over CAT5.

It's not long term space. I have around 7TB's of storage sitting around and plenty available for actual library storage. I wouldn't waste 4 VelociRaptors in storage space. It's just temp storage for a few days at a time between offloading the finished rips to my media storage and making room for new rips. Currently I've got a 2TB storage drive on my HTPC, but I will most likely bump that up to a 4TB drive and eventually get around to building a LoVo media server as I fill that up.
I'm curious, what type of file system are you using to get 20GB rips? I am after the best possible quality and am always looking for the most efficient method.
 
You might find it easier to just run all the optical drives off the motherboard's ports and sticking the drives on an inexpensive HBA/RAID card for compatibility reasons. You can find a number of relatively cheap rebranded LSI cards that will do the trick.

My original plan was to run the Optical drives off of the native ports, the OS drive off of a mSATA SSD, and go hardware RAID controller for the VelociRaptors. But the motherboard I have in mind (BOXDH87RL), and currently the only useful LGA 1150 mATX board on the market with a useable mSATA/mPCIe port, only has 5 SATA ports with the sixth being rerouted to the mSATA slot. Thereby limiting my available optical drives. Another factor is the availability of good quality, low-price hardware RAID controllers, even with only 4 SATA ports. The cheapest even remotely reputable 4 port, SATA 6Gbit RAID controller I was able to find was the HighPoint RocketRAID 640L for $95.
I'm hoping that a cheapie Non-RAID 8 port SATA controller will be at least the same price or cheaper.
This way, I can run the VelociRaptors in RAID 10 off of the onboard RAID and the optical drives all off of one expansion card with room for up to eight in the future.
 
I'm hoping that a cheapie Non-RAID 8 port SATA controller will be at least the same price or cheaper.

I would consider a used LSI SAS card from eBay. Like the IBM M1015

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-SERVERA...750?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4856240236

However you will need 2 SFF-8087 forward break out cables like this:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10254&cs_id=1025406&p_id=8186&seq=1&format=2


Edit: This BR10i is a much better deal (you will still need the 2 SFF-8087 forward break out cables).

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRA...sk_Controllers_RAID_Cards&hash=item257e19cd3d
 
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Greetings

It most likely will have to be a dedicated SATA card as most of the SAS cards like M1015 and LSI cards only support SAS and SATA as there is probably no ATAPI support e.g. My X79S-UP5 motherboard specs for the onboard Intel C606 SAS controller takes both SAS and SATA drives but states

"8 x SAS 3Gb/s connectors (SAS2 0~7) supporting up to 8 SAS 3Gb/s devices
* The SAS connectors do not support optical drives.".

The sata cards may support optical drives, typically they mention that they have have "SATA ports" and that they "support SATA drives" but they don't explicitly state whether they have ATAPI support or not and without ATAPI the optical drives probably won't work when connected either.

Something you have better verify before you buy anything.

P.S. maybe investigate optical drive duplicator towers and see if you can plug them into your PC, you may need eSATA with port multiplier support to see more than one drive on the tower.

Cheers
 
Yeah, that came up in my research and was why I mentioned it in the OP. I've come across others that made that mistake. Of course SATA specific cards are not industry standard and as such aren't as supported. It makes sense considering how much space you can save with SAS connections along with the money to be made selling the fan cables extra. Basically the same reason Cisco is moving to an all SFP module line. Tons of money to be made in the extras.
 
So would anyone have any suggestions on a dedicated 8 port SATA controller? Doesn't have to be RAID, doesn't even really have to be 6Gbit/s considering even 12x BD-ROMs tap out at a theoretical 432Mbit/s. I wouldn't even saturate one channel, if I could guarantee ATAPI support, I'd even go for some sort of splitter that shared out one or two 6Gbit ports.
 
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