Opinions on this setup? 40GbE SAN for 4k film scans

[jgreco]

I don't know which driver FreeNAS would use, nor how I could tell without first installing it. Anyone?

aac(4).

You might want to read the warning label: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/10189/

 

[friolator]

You might want to read the warning label: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/10189/

Fair enough. We'll just keep using that in desktop RAIDs then. It's been fine under Windows for years, so it'll stay there, I guess!

 

[jgreco]

Fair enough. We'll just keep using that in desktop RAIDs then. It's been fine under Windows for years, so it'll stay there, I guess!

I have no doubt that the Adaptec works fine on their primary market platform.

 

[Stux]

I'm talking about one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133033

While I've never used one myself, it goes from the motherboard (or SATA controller card) SATA ports to an SFF8087 port on the enclosure's drive backplane. With 9 of the 10 ports on the motherboard going unused in this build, my thought was that I could use two of these cables and hang 8 drives off the motherboard SATA ports. That would mean I'd only need a 12-port card for the remaining drives inside the enclosure, which is cheaper than buying a 24port card for the 20 internal drives.



The spec sheet for this as well as the manual lists FreeBSD as a supported OS, but not much more beyond that. I don't know which driver FreeNAS would use, nor how I could tell without first installing it. Anyone?

It is my understanding that you can use 2 reverse breakout cables to go from 8 motherboard Sata ports to 2 mini sas (SFF-8087) on a passive (non extender) backplane and then connect to 8 Sata drives. That's what I plan to do. Guess I'll know if it works when my cpu arrives!

 

[Ericloewe]

It is my understanding that you can use 2 reverse breakout cables to go from 8 motherboard Sata ports to 2 mini sas (SFF-8087) on a passive (non extender) backplane and then connect to 8 Sata drives. That's what I plan to do. Guess I'll know if it works when my cpu arrives!

Yes, but you're still limited to 1m total cable length. And SATA 6Gb/s can be very picky.

 

[friolator]

I ordered a couple of these reverse breakout cables, which will cover two rows of drives in the enclosure. The remaining drives will be taken care of by a pair of M1015 cards I picked up cheap on ebay. All of the connections are in the enclosure, with cables about 24 inches long.

 

[Brett K]

Just ordered the following components:

SuperMicro X10SLR-F Motherboard
64GB (4x16) ECC Registered DDR4 RAM
Xeon E5 1620 v3
OCZ RC400A PCIe SSD
SuperMicro CPU Cooler
Chelsio T580-SO-CR 40GbE NIC
LSI 9305 24i SAS HBA

I know the OCZ isn't an Intel SSD, but we've had very good luck with their 2.5" SSDs so far (they're in 6 of our workstations, plus two laptops) with no failures so far, and this is within the budget. This will be the SLOG drive.

Should have everything here next week. In the mean time we're going to start backing up everything on the FreeNAS system so the drives can be moved into the new box next week.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll post back here with any updates.

Hi, Nice System! we are in the process of building our 1st freenas unit and it is similar to yours. We are having issues with the 9305-24i recognizing the hard drives. Could you let me know what drives you used? We are using these.....for now
Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 8TB 7200RPM 12Gb/s SAS 256 MB Cache Internal Bare Drive ST8000NM0075

 

[friolator]

That list is incorrect - I think I must have copy/pasted the controller card by mistake when I posted that, because that's not the config we're using. Instead we have the following setup for drives:

2x M1015 cards (actually they're LSI 9240 cards, not the IBM, but they're cross flashed to IT mode as with the M1015)
1x LSI 9201-16e (to connect to an outboard drive enclosure eventually)
We're also using some of the internal SATA ports on the motherboard, with a breakout cable that goes from SATA to SAS (to connect to the enclosure's drive backplane).

That being said, we've been burning this system in without drives for the past month, while working on other projects. I'm satisfied the motherboard and other components are good to go, so the plan is to start adding drives in vdevs of probably 8-10 disks in the coming days, and burn those in as we go.

-perry