Cheap 8 drive rack

[personalmountains]

I'm building my first iteration of what I hope will be a server that's fairly easy to expand in the future. I think I have most of the hardware figured out thanks for the forums (X10SL7, G3220, SeaSonic PSU, in a uATX case), but I'm having trouble with the hard drives.

I'm planning on buying eight 3.5" drives for now and just plug them directly on the motherboard. In the future, I'll probably buy some SAS expander for more drives, but I only need eight for now. I obviously don't want the drives to be sitting on my desk, so I'm looking for a simple rack or cage that can hold eight 3.5" drives. I don't need a backplane or anything fancy. Just a box with a fan or two.

What I'm finding are either cages meant to go in a case or full-fledged enclosures with backplanes like the TR8X6G. Is there anything else that you guys can recommend?

 

[Stux]

The only external cages that will be recommended will involve sas expanders.

I did look into building some tower formfactor drive cages by using dvd duplicator chassis with 5in3 modules, but they're more expensive than just getting a large hotswap rack mount chassis.

Is there a particular reason you're going with Haswell instead of Skylake (X11)

 

[personalmountains]

The only external cages that will be recommended will involve sas expanders.

I guess my build isn't conventional, then. I was hoping to avoid spending an additional 500$+ for no immediate benefit.

Is there a particular reason you're going with Haswell instead of Skylake (X11)

Well, darn. It wasn't mentioned at all in the hardware recommendation thread, but now I see the pinned X11 FAQ. Back to the drawing board, I guess (again!)

 

[anodos]

I guess my build isn't conventional, then. I was hoping to avoid spending an additional 500$+ for no immediate benefit.



Well, darn. It wasn't mentioned at all in the hardware recommendation thread, but now I see the pinned X11 FAQ. Back to the drawing board, I guess (again!)

I think once you add in the extra PSU and other parts needed to power and connect the external JBOD. Why not just get a cheap chassis that can handle enough drives? Like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16811147164

It's not spectacular, but it probably gets good enough airflow to keep everything cool.

 

[personalmountains]

Why not just get a cheap chassis that can handle enough drives? Like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16811147164

Why didn't this thing ever come up in my searches in the past three days? Thanks for the recommendation.

As for the X11, the model with an SAS controller (similar to the X10SL7) would be the X11SSH-CTF, but a quick search on newegg and amazon didn't return anything in Canada. I might just decide to stay with the X10.

So, could I just get the 15 bay chassis you suggested, and then put a X10SL7, a SeaSonic X-850 and a couple of drives in it? That would be pretty close to what I'm looking for.

 

[Stux]

I guess my build isn't conventional, then. I was hoping to avoid spending an additional 500$+ for no immediate benefit.

So, external chassis, which can take drives can be connected via :

1) USB: Which is not a good idea.
2) eSATA, which involves a SATA multiplier, which is not a good idea
3) Thunderbolt, I don't think this works with FreeBSD ;)
4) SAS, which involves an expander in the chassis, and then an external MiniSAS cable running to a SAS card/port in your main chassis, which is a good idea, but also not a 'cheap' solution.

The cheapest solution is to have a Bunch of Disks in a chassis with a motherboard and a bunch of sas or sata ports connected. 8/10 ports is fairly easy to arrange, and then a 50-100$ SAS card can be used to add another 8 drives without using any sas expanders.

Well, darn. It wasn't mentioned at all in the hardware recommendation thread, but now I see the pinned X11 FAQ. Back to the drawing board, I guess (again!)

Yeah. I think it might be out of date. I'd recommend Skylake unless you need more than 64GB or more than 4 cores. In which case you're looking at an E5-16XX build anyway.

 

[Stux]

Why didn't this thing ever come up in my searches in the past three days? Thanks for the recommendation.

As for the X11, the model with an SAS controller (similar to the X10SL7) would be the X11SSH-CTF, but a quick search on newegg and amazon didn't return anything in Canada. I might just decide to stay with the X10.

So, could I just get the 15 bay chassis you suggested, and then put a X10SL7, a SeaSonic X-850 and a couple of drives in it? That would be pretty close to what I'm looking for.

Btw, if you only need 8 drives for now, do you reall need the sas on board when the mobo will probably support 8 drives anyway?

https://www.supermicro.com.tw/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SSM-F.cfm

 

[personalmountains]

The cheapest solution is to have a Bunch of Disks in a chassis with a motherboard and a bunch of sas or sata ports connected. 8/10 ports is fairly easy to arrange, and then a 50-100$ SAS card can be used to add another 8 drives without using any sas expanders.

Actually, this is close to my initial build. I was hoping to reuse the Z68 motherboard from my main machine (and get an upgrade!) and use a PCIe controller (AOC-SAS2LP-MV8) with breakout cables. Then I realized the Z68 didn't support ECC RAM :(

Then I found the X10, which comes with an integrated SAS controller. I thought I could just put all that in a small uATX case and have the drives in a separate enclosure without a backplane for now. I'd use the power supply from the case (maybe with extension cables). I didn't mind having cables running outside the case.

For a while, I was actually thinking of just getting two 4-bay cages and have them sit on the desk. I don't really like this though, which is why I started this thread in the first place.

For me, the advantage of separating the computer and the drives is that I'm not constrained to a chassis. I can add as many drives as I want forever.

Btw, if you only need 8 drives for now, do you reall need the sas on board when the mobo will probably support 8 dives anyway?

Then I'd need to buy a new motherboard or a PCIe controller in a year. I want to save some money if possible, but I don't want to cripple the build.

 

[anodos]

For me, the advantage of separating the computer and the drives is that I'm not constrained to a chassis. I can add as many drives as I want forever.

That sounds good on paper, but in practice it'll end up being more of a hassle, more expensive, and more likely to break. In almost all circumstances you're better off using a single large chassis (unless you're dealing with rack-mounted servers and are buying proper jbod expansion shelves).

 

[Nick2253]

That sounds good on paper, but in practice it'll end up being ... more likely to break.

This is a big one. I inherited a backup server that my predecessor had set up this way, and I'll tell you that I spent more time fixing the thing than it would have cost the company to just buy a new one. Expanders work great on paper, but their purpose should really be to expand a system that can no longer be expanded in the conventional sense. At that point, the cost of a proper expander is worth it. If you go for budget expanders, you'll quickly find them to be unreliable either obviously, or worse, silently.

If your concern is that you'll run out of space to add more drives, don't worry too much about that now. You can always add a SAS expander and JBOD tray if you really need space. More than likely, you'll top out somewhere around 16 drives, and any expansion you do to your system will be when you replace drives with larger models. (I say that based on what I've seen here and elsewhere.)