SOLVED Sonnet Fusion D800RAID / DX800RAID and second hand hard drives

lightwave

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Just got an offer to buy two old Sonnet Fusion disk enclosures and RAID controllers. Both enclosures support 8 disks and connect to the RAID controller via two SSF 8088 cables (4 disk per cable). Have anyone tried these with FreeNAS? Should I be concern about reliability considering their age (5 and 10 years respectively)?

The enclosures are sold with 8 used hard drives each. Would you be concerned about their reliability? I'm considering setting them up as four-way mirrors so that multiple failures have a low chance of compromising data. Or would you just buy some new disks and throw the used ones away?

The Sonnet cabinets (on wayback machine, they are no longer available on the Sonnet web site):
* Sonnet Fusion D800RAID (https://web.archive.org/web/20110511035203/http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiond800raid.html)
* Sonnet Fusion DX800RAID (https://web.archive.org/web/20091004164801/http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiondx800raid.html)

Thank you in advance!
 

sretalla

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I would be more worried about the RAID cards (although I guess you can just avoid installing them and try plugging the SSF 8088 cables into an LSI HBA card that will be OK with FreeNAS. It's not clear how the backplane is setup, but if you work around the RAID cards, there's a chance that you can get away with it.
 

lightwave

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Thank you for your reply, sretalla

The RAID cards seem to be ATTO ExpressSAS (possibly R680), but I have not been able to confirm it. There are supposedly FreeBSD drivers for these cards, but based on some googling, they are not included in the FreeNAS distribution. Will probably be easier to get a cheap LSI card (e.g. IBM M1015) and try it out.

A somewhat crazy idea would be to connect the enclosure directly to the mini-SAS connector on the main board (requires a SSF 8087 to 8088 converter). Assuming that the enclosure just splits out the connection to each drive without a SAS Expander or anything else that expects to speak SAS rather than SATA with the main board, it might just work. Anybody tried such an approach?
 

caplam

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Hello,
that's funny, i'm not on freenas but i'm too looking for intel on sonnet enclosures.
Based on what i found there is an expander in the dx800 raid. The firsts models contain 3Gb/s expander until son005 model number.
son011 and later contain 6Gb/s expander.
No clue on how to find model number.
The first models were sold with an atto R380 sas raid card while the latter came with a R680.
I suspect the change from R380 to R680 did not came at the same moment as the change from son005 to son011 but no certitude.
From what i understood trying to change the expander from a 3G to a 6G is pointless as there was also a change of the backplane.
I have not found an example of someone using such an enclosure with a lsi hba but i guess the enclosure is using pretty standard sas stuff so it should work.
I'd like to find an easy way to have the model number so i could ask the seller what is his model number.
Nevertheless 1 or 2 3G enclosure could be a desirable extension to my storage even if there would be performance drop when using ssd.

edit: forgot to mention i have not much intel on D800 except it has no expander.
 

lightwave

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Hi Caplam,

What a coincidence. Have you decided to buy a DX800 yet?

Thanks for the confirmation and additional details about the ATTO cards. Based on this, I will probably get the IBM/Lenovo N2125 card I've had my eyes at. More likely to work well with FreeBSD/FreeNas.

A wild guess could be that the model number corresponds to the first three digits of the serial number. Could explain the rather high serial numbers of these units compared the number of units they have likely produced over time.

I'm kind of leaning towards buying the D800 rather than the DX800 to avoid the expander. With a little luck, the D800 backpane only connects the SAS/SATA drives to the InfiniBand connector on the back. In that case, it should support 6G with a 6G LSI-card. Also, the SAS expander in the DX800 could possibly put limitations on the drive size (it does support 4TB disks, but I'm not sure it supports anything larger).

Let me know if you decide to get a DX800. Very interested to hear how it works out for you; especially if you try it with an LSI HBA.

All the best!
 

lightwave

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A quick update on the outcome, should it be of value to anybody in the future.

I ended up buying the DX800 and I have used it together with an IBM/Lenovo N2125 card on my FreeNAS server for the last year. It has proven to be a good setup. The DX800 turned out to be a really nice 8-disk enclosure. Build quality is surprisingly good for hardware targeted at small businesses (perhaps not too surprising when considering its original outrageous price tag). Noice level is quite reasonable for a "closet server" and practically silent compared to most server-grade SAS-enclosures out there. Based on my experience so far, I would not hesitate to recommend it for personal/home use. I am actually looking for a second Sonnet enclosure for a backup FreeNAS box.

My choice of the DX800 over the D800 (which I did prefer) was down to the state of the actual machines in question. It turned out that the D800 had been running 24/7 for five years while the DX800 had been used as an off-line cold backup. Based on the SMART-stats of the (still original) disks, the unit had seen less than 300 hours of runtime in 10 years. While the disks may have deteriorated over time, I suspect the enclosure was still close to "good-as-new".

On a footnote on the effect of age on drives in cold storage, I did set up a 7-disk RAID-Z2 with a hot spare using the 10 year old 1 TB drives. I experienced one disk failure in the first week, but the remaining drives are still going strong. I do keep backups though ...
 

FILMTOOLS

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A quick update on the outcome, should it be of value to anybody in the future.

I ended up buying the DX800 and I have used it together with an IBM/Lenovo N2125 card on my FreeNAS server for the last year. It has proven to be a good setup. The DX800 turned out to be a really nice 8-disk enclosure. Build quality is surprisingly good for hardware targeted at small businesses (perhaps not too surprising when considering its original outrageous price tag). Noice level is quite reasonable for a "closet server" and practically silent compared to most server-grade SAS-enclosures out there. Based on my experience so far, I would not hesitate to recommend it for personal/home use. I am actually looking for a second Sonnet enclosure for a backup FreeNAS box.

My choice of the DX800 over the D800 (which I did prefer) was down to the state of the actual machines in question. It turned out that the D800 had been running 24/7 for five years while the DX800 had been used as an off-line cold backup. Based on the SMART-stats of the (still original) disks, the unit had seen less than 300 hours of runtime in 10 years. While the disks may have deteriorated over time, I suspect the enclosure was still close to "good-as-new".

On a footnote on the effect of age on drives in cold storage, I did set up a 7-disk RAID-Z2 with a hot spare using the 10 year old 1 TB drives. I experienced one disk failure in the first week, but the remaining drives are still going strong. I do keep backups though ...

Did anyone try to use large capacity spinning disks? like these new 10-12TB drives in DX800? Would it work?
 

sretalla

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Did anyone try to use large capacity spinning disks? like these new 10-12TB drives in DX800? Would it work?
Without trying it, I would expect the answer to be that if the HBA supports those drives, they will work.
 

sretalla

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If it's just passing through the SAS/SATA connections to the HBA, it would be OK. (seems at least partially confirmed by @lightwave

However, in just conforming that, I looked at their website and I don't like what I'm seeing there for those products... seems they are gone or now changed to a completely different concept.
 
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lightwave

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I haven't tried the enclosure with disks larger than 1.5 TB, so I'm afraid I cannot say whether it will work or not. I don't think the enclosure was ever sold with larger disks than 1.5 TB.

However, if you happen to have the Gb/s expander version, I would think it should be able to handle 10-12 TB disks (and larger). However, if it is the 3 Gb/s expander version, there may be a limit of 2 TB per disk. As far as I can make out, this is not actually a limitation of the SAS-1 standard, but rather a limitation on some implementations. Hence, it may not be a limitation for the DX800 expander as long as your HBA supports the disk size. Only way to find out is to try.

On a separate note, my DX800 is still going strong 2.5 years after I bought it. May be legacy hardware, but very good value at the price I paid. The now >15 years old disks are, however, finally giving up. I have had 2 complete disk failures (replaced) and another one have been warning about S.M.A.R.T. errors for over a 1 year (but still working). I am now moving to 3x18Tb disks (mirrored) mounted in the FreeNAS box - no use in spending more money on 1 TB disks to replace the old ones. The enlosure will be given a vacation and put to backup duties (with new disks) at a later point in time.
 
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