Will this Backplane Screw Me Up? Sanity Check.

[Jimbo]

I'm looking at getting an SNT SNT-SAS425 4 x 2.5" HDD in 1 x 5.25" bay SAS/SATA 2.5" Hot Swap Backplane RAID cage Daisy Chain Ready from Newegg will do those all as RADI-0.

I'am also looking at getting 4-crucial 300 64GB disks and running them also in Raid-0.

My RAID card will be a HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL 8-Port PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SAS/SATA RAID Controller by*HighPoint. It is a 6GB Card and I will be using dual 4into1 SAS cables from the RAID card to the Backplane on the 2.5 to 5.25 caddy.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816710002
http://www.amazon.com/HighPoint-Rock...d_bxgy_e_img_b

My question is will the Backplane (SATA 2.0) even with the dual SAS, significantly interfere with the transfer speed of my new SSDs that can do 415MB limit, or will the dual SAS daisy chain mostly make that a non-issue. If I am going to go to this much trouble, I don't want to bottleneck things too bad, if at all.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148441

I have looked around and I cannot get a straight answer on this question as this is the first time at all I have worked with SAS/SATA.

thanks!

 

[Spikesoldier]

good question.

i cant give you a straight yes/no answer, but my intuition tells me the backplane could bottleneck the extreme performance you want to place inside it.

 

[Jimbo]

Oh shucks!

Any way around that slight problem?
Any 6GB daddy's that would fix me up?
I don't readily see one out there.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Ehhhh... you probably won't see a huge real-world impact. Yeah, you might drop a little bit on the backplane but at least you will saturate it. The benefits you will get from running a much larger parallel array of SSD flash chips outweighs any minor bottlenecking in my view. I say go for it!

 

[Jimbo]

I must have looked in the wrong places.
Amazon has it in SATA/SAS in the 6GB speed.

Woot!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0040Z924Q/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER

 

[dorion]

Why are you looking at spending an extra $220 and vastly increasing complexity for what probably won't be a major increase in speed over a 256GB M400?

Raiding those drives will only boost throughput to what the controller can handle, and the IOPs will be limited by the lowest of the drives or the controller.

 

[Jimbo]

Good points but I wanted some flexibility to do other stuff down the road, and this might be an easy way to lean.
What cheap SATA 6 card would you recommend?

 

[dorion]

Hey, so Tom's just did an article on some controllers.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sas-6gb-raid-controller,3028.html

Your controller of choice got tested, here a snippet:

This controller clearly wasn’t built for SSDs. Its read rates max out at 332 MB/s and the writes peak at 273 MB/s.

Also I couldn't really recommend a cheap card, my best experience is the SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 with ZFS, never really had the balls to spend $300 on a decent controller.

 

[Jimbo]

Thanks again dorion!

My plans have changed. I'll skip that whole SSD RAID thing and just do raid 6 or 10 with conventional platters. The speed loss wont be noticeable under those options and I'll not be into some serious money for a serious SAS card.
Thanks to everyone in this thread.
You straightened me out.