New Storage PC

I'm asking for advice on a new PC at my office that will mainly be used for image/video processing and light gaming.

I currently have ~15 TB data on 4x4TB hard drives in a non RAID setting. I hope to build a durable system that can last for 5-10 years that can eventually accomodate for at least 80TB of storage, the more the better.

NAS is not an option because my company forbids wifi routers for privacy reasons so I need everything on the system.

I am under the impression that there are two options
1) Use a motherboard with on board RAID 5.
2) Add a RAID controller card.

My questions are
- Are there motherboards that have 10+ SATA ports that support RAIDing of all these drives? If yes, are they stable? How do they compare with a RAID controller?
- For option 2, what RAID card would be recommended? How much should I be prepared to pay? I don't have a fixed budget but am cost conscious.
- What cases can accomodate for 10+ internal 3.5 hard drives?
- What graphics card would I need for the aforementioned purposes. I plan to have 2-3 displays, one being 4k
- Do hard drives emit a lot of heat or power? What sort of PSU would I need and do I need extra cooling fans or water cooling?
- In fact if someone can come with a component list I should be very grateful.

I have only built one computer before (a simple one indeed) so please bear with my noobie questions.

Thanks in advance!

fraushai said:

NAS is not an option because my company forbids wifi routers for privacy reasons so I need everything on the system.

Click to expand...

I don't understand this statement.

My NAS has 4 1 GB network jacks on the back...no WiFi connection (even though it can use a USB WiFi adapter.)

Well...

1. A NAS is still an option. Make it wired.
2. To get up to 80TB capacity, you will need something with at least 13 bays using 6TB drives or something expandable.
3. For your uses, I would recommend a hardware RAID solution be it a device or a card that goes into a system.

My questions are
- Are there motherboards that have 10+ SATA ports that support RAIDing of all these drives? If yes, are they stable? How do they compare with a RAID controller?
- For option 2, what RAID card would be recommended? How much should I be prepared to pay? I don't have a fixed budget but am cost conscious.
- What cases can accomodate for 10+ internal 3.5 hard drives?
- What graphics card would I need for the aforementioned purposes. I plan to have 2-3 displays, one being 4k
- Do hard drives emit a lot of heat or power? What sort of PSU would I need and do I need extra cooling fans or water cooling?
- In fact if someone can come with a component list I should be very grateful.

Click to expand...

1. Yes... Check out ASUS and ASRock "WS" (WOrkstation) boards. They are 'stable' but not sure you want to go that route for a business...a RAID card or a dedicated device would be a better choice.
2. A few hundred.
3. Not sure offhand. Newegg should have a filter though...
4. 'light gaming' at the office at 4K? Heh, GTX 980Ti or r9 390x or Fury would be what I would get.
4. Depending on the drive, 10W or so each. PSU depends on the system... LOL, no watercooling HDDs man.

I have a comment and a question. First I would not spend $$$ today for capacity I need in five years. I might provide the foundations for that (e.g. case, PSU, mobo and/or NAS.) I have two reasons for this. First, drives continue to come down in price. If you need 1/4 of the capacity for the next three years, you can provision 20TB today and in three years upgrade capacity. This is likely to cost less than purchasing 80TB today. Second, I'm not confident that today's drives will last ten years. I would plan replacement based on warranty period. The retired drives can be repurposed as offline backup (power up, write and shut down.) There may be issues power cycling drives that have run continuously for years but you will find out if they will tolerate that kind of usage. (Years ago it was thought that the spindle bearings would wear but be OK as long as the drive remained powered. Maybe it is not an issue.)

Second, how do you plan to back up this data? Or conversely, what is the damage if a H/W failure makes the drives unreadable or a human or S/W error trashes the files. I'm not really conversant with options at this magnitude. For my needs (3TB home built NAS) I have a second one at my son's place that mirrors the local NAS. The local NAS includes multiple copies of my personal data from my various PCs. I'm not sure you want to duplicate 80TB of storage. At that capacity you may be looking at some sort of tape drive. You can rotate several sets of tapes so that some can be kept off site.

That leads me to another question. Do you need all of this data on line at all times? If not, perhaps it would be cost effective to copy inactive projects to tape storage and put copies in a safe place. One place I know that does that is Fermilab in Batavia IL. They collect huge amounts of data during their experiments and save it to tape, bringing it on line for later analysis. I visited over ten years ago and at that time they had petabytes of data stored and it is just not possible to have that all on line at one time, nor is it even desirable. Only so much data can be processed at one time.

Please let us know what solution you implement. I find this interesting.