BUILD I need an "expansion" chassis

[Michael Schultz]

Hello all! After eyeing the 8tb wd red's for the last long while, it has come to my attention that the bulk 2tb lots on ebay are the the most tb's per $ spent so I have decided to expand the number of drives I can have instead of upgrading the size of the drives.

I have a pretty beefy dell poweredge 720 has the head of my freenas setup and a silverstone 20bay chassis for holding all the drives. There silverstone case is only used for drives and a powersupply, it doesn't have motherboard/cpu/memory. I have 2m long sas cables between the dell HBA's and the silverstone backplane.

4x 8 core intel xeon
256 GB ddr 3 ecc memory
4x sas3 hba's (will need to be increased)
4x 8tb seagate archive drives (these need to be removed asap as they are terrible drives for a nas sytem and put my whole system at risk)
10x 2tb ebay drives
4x 4tb random desktop drives

Do they make rack-mountable chassis/cases that only have room from power supplies and hard drives?

 

[nightshade00013]

Yep make tons of them, called Expansion chassis, expansion enclosures, or drive enclosures.

You could also just get something like http://www.ebay.com/itm/SUPERMICRO-...S-24x-TRAYS-/142255651535?hash=item211f18facf with a SAS card in the server with an adapter to connect to the internal expander. The one linked will not work with drives over 2TB so be careful if you use something like that.

 

[Michael Schultz]

Yep make tons of them, called Expansion chassis, expansion enclosures, or drive enclosures.

You could also just get something like http://www.ebay.com/itm/SUPERMICRO-...S-24x-TRAYS-/142255651535?hash=item211f18facf with a SAS card in the server with an adapter to connect to the internal expander. The one linked will not work with drives over 2TB so be careful if you use something like that.

Thanks for the reply! I have found a few items that look like they fit the bill. Primarily these things:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Xyrate...658319?hash=item5694dc618f:g:tWgAAOSw4CFYn76h

They are cheap (~250USD used,) space efficient (24 bays in 2u's) and don't have their own components which seems to be a common thing for these to have. Will I have any problem hooking up the dell xyratex to my hba's do you think? looks like the xyratex just takes a regular sas cable.

 

[Ericloewe]

The one linked will not work with drives over 2TB so be careful if you use something like that.

That can be fixed by replacing the backplane with an SAS2 or SAS3 expander backplane. And I do think that LSI SAS1 backplanes don't limit drive size, but I could be wrong about that one.

Thanks for the reply! I have found a few items that look like they fit the bill. Primarily these things:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Xyrate...658319?hash=item5694dc618f:g:tWgAAOSw4CFYn76h

They are cheap (~250USD used,) space efficient (24 bays in 2u's) and don't have their own components which seems to be a common thing for these to have. Will I have any problem hooking up the dell xyratex to my hba's do you think? looks like the xyratex just takes a regular sas cable.

That looks dubious:

• The lack of expander makes for an atrocious mess of cables...
• ...and it also limits you to SAS drives, due to signal integrity limitations of the SATA physical layer.
• Cooling for two drives in a row is going to be noisy. Jet engine noisy.

 

[Michael Schultz]

That can be fixed by replacing the backplane with an SAS2 or SAS3 expander backplane. And I do think that LSI SAS1 backplanes don't limit drive size, but I could be wrong about that one.


That looks dubious:

• The lack of expander makes for an atrocious mess of cables...
• ...and it also limits you to SAS drives, due to signal integrity limitations of the SATA physical layer.
• Cooling for two drives in a row is going to be noisy. Jet engine noisy.

So upon further inspection, the 24 bay 2u was for 2.5" drives so that won't work. Noise isn't much of an issue as my rack is in the furnace room. I also don't really care about a mess of cables as I already have 5 sas cables going out the dell and into the chassis with all the bays. Whats another 10? ;)

How much would a sas2+ backplane for that chassis cost? I could just buy another silverstone 4u for ~600 if there isn't anything comparable around.

 

[Ericloewe]

How much would a sas2+ backplane for that chassis cost?

I dunno, it would probably be cheaper to look for a chassis that already has one.