Hello I have recently purchased a mixture of off-lease server equipment which I will be building a server for my office utilizing this equipment for business use. Some of the items I have purchased that will relate to this question is:
- BPN-SAS3-826EL1 (backplane in my 2U 12-Bay 3.5")
- LSI 9361-8i 2GB Cache (SAS3 Raid controller with 2 ports)
- ST8000NM0045 (8TB SAS 12Gb 256MB Cache 7.2K)
My goal is to fully utilize all 12 of these bays with 12 8TB SAS3 drives in a Raid 10 configuration in hopes of having minimal bottlenecks. I have a basic understanding (or atleast I think I do) of how expanders work and how with a single HBA they allow you to interface multiple drives but at the cost of potential performance decreases when compared to 1:1 configurations. So I have just a couple of questions. giving the above, is there a way to calculate potential bandwidth? It seems pretty obvious to me that the more drives I connect to this raid controller the less potential bandwidth/bottlenecks given the above hardware. I know that the more dirves I interface with this single controller the less preformance I can expect, but at which point will that be. Given that a Raid 10 improves read and write performance compared to a single drive alone will that even matter using an expander? My last question is, is that after reading through the manual from supermicro for the backplane it looks like there are 4 SAS ports. It states that they are bi-directional and can be used as inputs or outputs. I'm not sure what exactly that means but I had a thought. Does this mean that I can possibly connect my HBA which has 2 ports to 2 of the 4 ports on the backplane effectively using both channels from the HBA to distribute bandwidth amongst all 12 drives in a single Raid 10? Or must I split the channels up for example port 0 from my HBA can have raid 10 for drives 1-6 and port 1 have a raid 10 for drives 7-12. I hope this is not a confusion question. Thank you so much for your help.
