High density JBOD

[Nigel Dunning]

Hi

I've got 90 spare 3.5" 4TB SAS drives at work, and we want to create an archive server.

I'm looking for some suggestions for higher density JBODs.
Supermicro has a great 90 Bay JBOD, but they only sell it pre configured with disks.

I wanted to have a 24 bay 2.5" 2U Supermicro server and fill that with SSD's
then I wanted a high density JBOD to full with the SAS drives.

Anyone using a 70+ bay JBOD they can recommend ?

 

[Mirfster]

Dang that is a lot of spare drives. Hopefully someone will reply, but I think that with having so many drives you may want to consider splitting it up? I always like to err on the side of avoiding any single points of failure and to me having all those drives in one unit would open the door for a huge single point of failure.

 

[jgreco]

The Supermicro 90 is sucky and you don't want it. Fans driving air past four layers of drives, a 4U EZ-Bake oven if ever there was one.

Get a pair of the 45's and call it a day.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E26-RJBOD1.cfm

 

[jgreco]

Also if it isn't obvious, for archival purposes, use 11 disk RAIDZ3 vdev's, four per unit with a hot spare gives you 120TB per chassis or 240TB total. Quite an archive. Don't cheap out on the host system. X10SRL plus E5-1650v3 plus at least 128GB is the minimum you want, or go to a dual board with the E5-2637v3.

 

[Ericloewe]

The Supermicro 90 is sucky and you don't want it. Fans driving air past four layers of drives, a 4U EZ-Bake oven if ever there was one.

Get a pair of the 45's and call it a day.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E26-RJBOD1.cfm

Who do they make them so deep if they sell them as "JBOD"s? Rebadged real chassis with motherboard support nominally removed?

 

[jgreco]

The SC847 unit I linked to is a true JBOD-only. There's no room inside for a mainboard. Just 24 drives on the front and 21 plus some PSU's on the rear.

The smart money's actually on buying the 24-drive SC846 JBOD, where you end up passing cool air over one set of drives and then expelling it, rather than running already-warm air over a second drive. That unit is, indeed, a rebadged full chassis that has, instead of a mainboard, a miniature JBOD controller. You can make a typical SC846-with-expander-backplane into a JBOD with very minimal effort.

Many people don't like the "poor" drive density of "merely" 24 disks in 4U, though I have to say a decade ago it was quite the thing.

 

[Nigel Dunning]

Dang that is a lot of spare drives. Hopefully someone will reply, but I think that with having so many drives you may want to consider splitting it up? I always like to err on the side of avoiding any single points of failure and to me having all those drives in one unit would open the door for a huge single point of failure.

Heh for us it is quite small, we actually had about another 120 spares, but I had the 45 bay JBODs for them to use.
I'm just trying to save space in our rack and avoid the 45 Bay supermicro JBODs if I can.

It is just a third tier of storage, to move projects from our main Isilon and Nexenta storage onto after they become inactive, redundancy isn't super important simply because most of these projects that go on our freenas servers will be inactive and we'll restore from tape if someone needs them.

 

[Nigel Dunning]

Also if it isn't obvious, for archival purposes, use 11 disk RAIDZ3 vdev's, four per unit with a hot spare gives you 120TB per chassis or 240TB total. Quite an archive. Don't cheap out on the host system. X10SRL plus E5-1650v3 plus at least 128GB is the minimum you want, or go to a dual board with the E5-2637v3.

I need to go with RAIDZ2, or maybe even 1, capacity is more important than safety for this use case.

The 45bay JBOD you posted, we already have a few of them, they work fine, but I was just hoping to get a bit better density as space in our racks is tough to find right now.

 

[jgreco]

I need to go with RAIDZ2, or maybe even 1, capacity is more important than safety for this use case.

The 45bay JBOD you posted, we already have a few of them, they work fine, but I was just hoping to get a bit better density as space in our racks is tough to find right now.

Well, then order the 90 bay units with the minimum 45 drive configuration. The problem is the heat.

 

[Fuganater]

What about two of these?

http://www.45drives.com/

 

[jgreco]

What about two of these?

http://www.45drives.com/

Relative crap compared to the Supermicro 45's, since their units are designed to integrate a mainboard, you have airflow past a number of banks of drives.

 

[Mirfster]

Relative crap compared to the Supermicro 45's, since their units are designed to integrate a mainboard, you have airflow past a number of banks of drives.

Lol, that may explain why Linus Tech never asked FreeNas to help; because he was already starting with crappy stuff...

 

[Fuganater]

Relative crap compared to the Supermicro 45's, since their units are designed to integrate a mainboard, you have airflow past a number of banks of drives.

Ah ok. They look like the ones that Backblaze uses.

 

[jgreco]

Ah ok. They look like the ones that Backblaze uses.

They are. They're crappish, at least relatively.