I'm in the early planning stages of upgrades to my FreeNAS box. I recently went through a nightmare with the SuperMicro hot swap drive bays, which I thought were going to be a good solution to drive additions/maintenance. They turned out to be just the opposite, and I wasted more money on them than I would have spend buying the Norco 24-hot swap drive case.
I know many are using this case for their builds, but how many are currently using them? I'd like to hear any feedback on the quality/performance. In case you're wondering, the problem I had with the SuperMicro hot swap bays is what appeared to be the drives not inserting into the backplane far enough, which resulted in data errors and very slow transfers. Removing the backplane or manually inserting the drives into the backplane without the drive bays remedied the problem. Supermicro was no help in getting it resolved, even though I worked extensively through their troubleshooting procedures before ID'ing the problem. Anyway, looking for a good solution to re-start my upgrades.
Also looking into SAS expanders to use with my M1015 card. Looking at the Intel SAS expander that many are using, although it's a little pricey. I'm almost maxed out right now running 7 drives, and I'm going to need to add drives in the near future. I would really like to add some remote console management (i.e. vPRO) into the new board, as well as provide enough LAN throughput to support streaming media to several devices through my home and +/- 5 VMs connected via iSCSI. I'm thinking 4 NICs total, but could maybe get away with less. Looking to stay budget minded, and was looking at uITX boards, but may need to step up to support more memory. Although the motherboard may need to be upgraded again before I max out the drives, it would be better to do it once than several times to get it right. Not sold on needing ECC RAM, etc.
Any suggestions on the case or other components are appreciated. I'll start putting a preliminary list together and post up in the next day or so.
I know many are using this case for their builds, but how many are currently using them? I'd like to hear any feedback on the quality/performance. In case you're wondering, the problem I had with the SuperMicro hot swap bays is what appeared to be the drives not inserting into the backplane far enough, which resulted in data errors and very slow transfers. Removing the backplane or manually inserting the drives into the backplane without the drive bays remedied the problem. Supermicro was no help in getting it resolved, even though I worked extensively through their troubleshooting procedures before ID'ing the problem. Anyway, looking for a good solution to re-start my upgrades.
Also looking into SAS expanders to use with my M1015 card. Looking at the Intel SAS expander that many are using, although it's a little pricey. I'm almost maxed out right now running 7 drives, and I'm going to need to add drives in the near future. I would really like to add some remote console management (i.e. vPRO) into the new board, as well as provide enough LAN throughput to support streaming media to several devices through my home and +/- 5 VMs connected via iSCSI. I'm thinking 4 NICs total, but could maybe get away with less. Looking to stay budget minded, and was looking at uITX boards, but may need to step up to support more memory. Although the motherboard may need to be upgraded again before I max out the drives, it would be better to do it once than several times to get it right. Not sold on needing ECC RAM, etc.
Any suggestions on the case or other components are appreciated. I'll start putting a preliminary list together and post up in the next day or so.
