Advice on 5.25" Drive Cage and the M1015

[Toadlips]

Good morning all,

I'm finally completing the hardware for my FreeNAS build and I'm looking for some advice on a hard drive cage that fits in the 5.25" bays. As a bonus question, I have an M1015 on order to give the extra ports that I need, but I'm curious if I should put my main pool on the M1015 rather than use the ports on the motherboard (SuperMicro X10SLL-F - chipset Intel® C222 Express PCH). Is there any advantage to that, or any additional features I would gain?

I should mention that the reason I purchased the M1015 was so that I had some extra ports to install a 2 to 4 slot 5.25" drive cage. My intention is to use the drive cage to swap out hard drives for backup and for copying all the various hard drives I have laying around onto the NAS. I'd like to be able to "hot swap" the drives without powering down the computer.

I was looking at this one, the iStarUSA BPN-DE230SS-BLACK: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215240. It looks pretty nice. It has some activity lights for each hard drive, but it doesn't have a power switch for each drive. How important is a power switch for the drive in terms of safely hot swapping? I don't want to risk moving the drive around while it's powering up or down if I can help it.

Also, if anyone has a suggestion for a good quality drive cage that'll fit 2 to 4 drives and allow me to safely hotswap, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!

 

[Lox]

Hi Toadlips,

I'm no expert by far on freenas, only been using it for a few months myself. but it shouldnt matter where you connect your hard drives to. even on SATA300 the hard drives will reach their maximum speed.

The Drive cages is mainly why i replied. Since i'm also looking at getting a few cages. And the one's you have selected from newegg seem very decent & solid equipement.
Most Hot swappable bays ive seen sofar dont have a power button, but power down as soon as they are ejected 1cm. (as soon as you move the latch)
and the only reason why you would hot swap a bay would be when it is going bad and has to be replaced anyway so i dont see a reason for a power switch.

Personally i was looking at a silverstone CFP52B cage with separate adapters. Since that would fit my 3 empty 5.25 bays perfectly. But this might not be what you are looking for.
http://silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=184&area=en

You do need to buy the sata adapters separately and the finished product looks less "professional". while the iStar product you selected looks very solid.

 

[Glorious1]

Regarding the M1015, no, there are no advantages or additional features that I'm aware of. In fact, there are a few disadvantages. You have to flash the board to firmware P16 IT mode, which some people say is trivial but it can be a pain to others. That's just a one-time thing. Also, erratically serial numbers of drives on the board may not show up in the GUI. Finally, drives on the board can't be set to automatically go into standby after some period of idle. Of course that's not an issue if you plan to keep them spinning.

 

[Toadlips]

Hi Toadlips,

I'm no expert by far on freenas, only been using it for a few months myself. but it shouldnt matter where you connect your hard drives to. even on SATA300 the hard drives will reach their maximum speed.

The Drive cages is mainly why i replied. Since i'm also looking at getting a few cages. And the one's you have selected from newegg seem very decent & solid equipement.
Most Hot swappable bays ive seen sofar dont have a power button, but power down as soon as they are ejected 1cm. (as soon as you move the latch)
and the only reason why you would hot swap a bay would be when it is going bad and has to be replaced anyway so i dont see a reason for a power switch.

Personally i was looking at a silverstone CFP52B cage with separate adapters. Since that would fit my 3 empty 5.25 bays perfectly. But this might not be what you are looking for.
http://silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=184&area=en

You do need to buy the sata adapters separately and the finished product looks less "professional". while the iStar product you selected looks very solid.

Thanks for the info, Lox!

I like that the iStar is all aluminum because it's classy, but I'm still not sure about how the hot swapping works. By hot swapping, I'm not actually talking about replacing a member disk of my main pool. I'd like to have the ability to put a drive in and move the contents to the NAS and then remove it. I have lots of hard drives around the house that I'd like to consolidate on the NAS. Also, I'd like to use several large hard drives as backup for the important datasets on the pool. It would be "nice" if I didn't have to power down the NAS to add or remove drives.

Is there a specific procedure I would need to go through to disconnect or "eject" the disk prior to removing it? I just don't like the thought of removing the disk and doing some physical damage, especially if the power is still on! Any info on this appreciated!! Thanks!

 

[Toadlips]

Regarding the M1015, no, there are no advantages or additional features that I'm aware of. In fact, there are a few disadvantages. You have to flash the board to firmware P16 IT mode, which some people say is trivial but it can be a pain to others. That's just a one-time thing. Also, erratically serial numbers of drives on the board may not show up in the GUI. Finally, drives on the board can't be set to automatically go into standby after some period of idle. Of course that's not an issue if you plan to keep them spinning.

Yep, I'm aware of the IT mode flashing, but wasn't aware of the other quirks. Hopefully, it'll go smoothly! I'm planning on using the M1015 to support various media drives and was hoping to "hot add" and "hot remove". Was really just curious if there were any pros and cons to using it as the main drive controller on the system. Since there is not, I'm going to keep things as they are and roll with it! Thanks for the info!

 

[Glorious1]

Most of the experts on this forum recommend against adding or removing drives while the machine is running, even if the hardware is supposed to support it. Mine is supposed to, and when I tried taking a drive out, two others suddenly went out and my volume was faulted. No permanent damage, but I'll never do that again!

 

[Ericloewe]

A few comments:

I'm happy with the hot swap bays I got. I'm convinced they're the best solution around (though the Silverstone one with the fan at the front looks interesting, if that fan is easily replaceable). They're the Icy Dock FatCage MB153SP-B, which is the 3-in-2 version. There's also 4-in-3 and (for the best density, but these require special chassis) 5-in-3.
Do make a replaceable fan non-negotiable - that means no proprietary connectors.

The "Insert drive. Copy stuff over. Store drive away safely" approach is possible, but tedious. Tedious tasks are a sure-fire way to cut corners.

If you want to add/remove drives with the system running, be absolutely sure to test every thinkable scenario before trying this when the server has data on it.

Moving as many drives as possible to SAS2 / SATA 6Gb/s connections gives a tiny performance benefit for data in cache. No real reason not to do it, but it's probably not even measurable.

 

[Toadlips]

Thanks Ericloewe and Glorious1, for the tips!

I just received the M1015 in the mail last night, and I flashed it to P16 in preparation. Still waiting for the cables and now I'll have to make a decision on the cage. I think I'll try the iStar...it looks like the fan should be replaceable, and I can work something out with the connectors if that proves to be an issue, but that's a good thought.

A lot of the drives I'll be consolidating will be NTFS drives, and they'll be on a separate controller from my actual ZFS pool. I'm hoping that will be enough distance to prevent anything "bad" from happening during a hot swap operation. The backup drives will each be a single drive pool, so I assume I use zpool offline and zpool online to manage their states before removing and when adding. There's also a camcontrol start and stop that appears to be what I'm looking for for generic disks, like NTFS and EXT4. I'm hoping that if I handle things gracefully, the NAS will behave gracefully. Am I on the right track?

Thanks!

 

[Ericloewe]

The problem isn't typically on the controller side. Intel SATA and LSI SAS both support it.

The problem is power delivery. The backplanes must support hot swap (recessed contacts and inrush limiting circuitry).

 

[Glorious1]

. . . for generic disks, like NTFS and EXT4

I don't think FreeNAS supports any file system other than ZFS. It will import data only from UFS, NTFS, MSDOS, or EXT2/3.

 

[Ericloewe]

I don't think FreeNAS supports any file system other than ZFS. It will import data only from UFS, NTFS, MSDOS, or EXT2/3.

Absolutely right.

Other filesystems are for one-time imports only.