I'm looking for a 3.5" SATA disk shelf capable of JBOD in the region of 16-32 drives that supports greater than 2.2TB drives, preferably that isn't a power guzzling jet engine and where firmware isn't hidden behind a pay wall. NetApp was my first thought, but given my lack of direct experience in this area I figured i'd ask for recommendations. I appreciate I could go with a Supermicro or Chenbro chassis and self build with an intel or HP port expander and an LSI based HBA, but a quick check of eBay shows this is likely to be a more expensive option.
Disk Shelf Suggestions?
- Thread starter Avalon
- Start date
"16-32 drives" and "isn't a power guzzling jet engine" don't really go in the same sentence.
2.2TB is quite precise, what do you intend to do with it out of interest? Presume you were thinking NetApp E-Series?
How much to spend, how many rack units available etc.
2.2TB is quite precise, what do you intend to do with it out of interest? Presume you were thinking NetApp E-Series?
How much to spend, how many rack units available etc.
What use ie nas?
How much raw storage Tb?
Built in raid or IT mode?
I was looking into building an unraid system and was looking for a 12 bay, cheapest off the bay I could find was based on
Dell FS12-NV7 2x AMD Quad Core 2.1Ghz 16GB RAM Cloud Server VMWare Rack Kit 2U
A lot of the cheap systems on sale are missing the hdd caddies / psu etc
All the systems are basically rack mounted and for server rooms so noise considerations were never taken into account.
How much raw storage Tb?
Built in raid or IT mode?
I was looking into building an unraid system and was looking for a 12 bay, cheapest off the bay I could find was based on
Dell FS12-NV7 2x AMD Quad Core 2.1Ghz 16GB RAM Cloud Server VMWare Rack Kit 2U
A lot of the cheap systems on sale are missing the hdd caddies / psu etc
All the systems are basically rack mounted and for server rooms so noise considerations were never taken into account.
Another vote for the HP kit - never had trouble getting firmware up to date.
Thanks for the replies, to answer the questions:
Noise/power are considerations as it's destined for home - I don't have WAF issues, but I try to remember it's not a DC.
Budget for a shelf is up to £600ish, i’d like dual
PSU, current preference is a DS4243 which start around £200, a 4246 would be nice, but it's top end of the budget and realistically unraid on mechanical drives will be fine with IOM3 and a module upgrade could happen later if I jump to something more IO focused e.g FreeNAS etc.
RU wise i'll be ordering in a suitable 8-12U and adding switch/patch and hopefully a little 10Gb action.
Usage is Unraid (so IT mode) with (up to) 28 data drives, 2 parity drives, additional drives will be passed to VM's, but are likely to be SSD's so housed in a GL380 G7 or possibly an R710, it makes more sense to keep SSD IO local.
Capacity wise i'll only be buying 8TB drives this time round. In the past few years i've built 5 storage servers, this will consolidate all of them
and some other things that are used occasionally.
MSA60 looks viable, it seems I may need an HP RAID card to upgrade firmware, or at least flash a compatible card to think it’s HP branded? Feedback says it’s loud, as long as i can swap fans out without it getting bent out of shape it may be a decent shout - the kids have ear defenders from my mining days
I currently run a 13 drive desktop set-up and will have finished the 12 disk expansion pod build next week. Just waiting on an H200e and cables to connect the additional 12 bays up. My limited experience of older disk shelves was they could be noisy/hot/power hungry, occasionally having hardware array size limits (non issue as JBOD/IT mode) or clipped individual drive sizes at a certain size or worse yet were picky about drives/drive firmware and as I plan to use SATA rather than SAS, the less picky, the better.
Noise/power are considerations as it's destined for home - I don't have WAF issues, but I try to remember it's not a DC.
Budget for a shelf is up to £600ish, i’d like dual
PSU, current preference is a DS4243 which start around £200, a 4246 would be nice, but it's top end of the budget and realistically unraid on mechanical drives will be fine with IOM3 and a module upgrade could happen later if I jump to something more IO focused e.g FreeNAS etc.
RU wise i'll be ordering in a suitable 8-12U and adding switch/patch and hopefully a little 10Gb action.
Usage is Unraid (so IT mode) with (up to) 28 data drives, 2 parity drives, additional drives will be passed to VM's, but are likely to be SSD's so housed in a GL380 G7 or possibly an R710, it makes more sense to keep SSD IO local.
Capacity wise i'll only be buying 8TB drives this time round. In the past few years i've built 5 storage servers, this will consolidate all of them
and some other things that are used occasionally.
MSA60 looks viable, it seems I may need an HP RAID card to upgrade firmware, or at least flash a compatible card to think it’s HP branded? Feedback says it’s loud, as long as i can swap fans out without it getting bent out of shape it may be a decent shout - the kids have ear defenders from my mining days
I currently run a 13 drive desktop set-up and will have finished the 12 disk expansion pod build next week. Just waiting on an H200e and cables to connect the additional 12 bays up. My limited experience of older disk shelves was they could be noisy/hot/power hungry, occasionally having hardware array size limits (non issue as JBOD/IT mode) or clipped individual drive sizes at a certain size or worse yet were picky about drives/drive firmware and as I plan to use SATA rather than SAS, the less picky, the better.
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For my home storage I've just bought a "4U Standard Chassis 15 x 3.5" HDD" for £83.99, it may not be exactly what you're after but price wise it's a fab deal. Comes with 3 x 120mm internal fans and then I think 2x80mm rear and 6x80mm front which are all loud but I have 3 fan controllers arriving from china to slow them down.
I've given up on unraid and I wouldn't recommend just two parity disks for that many large data drives unless you really do not care about the data, I'm now all in favour of SnapRAID but it's not for everyone.
I've given up on unraid and I wouldn't recommend just two parity disks for that many large data drives unless you really do not care about the data, I'm now all in favour of SnapRAID but it's not for everyone.
Well.. that is cool! I've been working with NetApp kit for the last 6 years extensively and I never even thought about connecting a DS4243 or DS4246 to a PC/Server. I didn't even think it would be possible due to the sector sizes used on the drives. It would appear that they can be formatted back to a usable 512b sector, you may need the NetApp PCI QSFP+/SAS card (X2065) to drive the shelf though.
Appreciate the suggestion, initially that looks great value, but the costs are hidden. If I went down this route i'd need to add a decent PSU (skip the redundancy for the sake of argument), and then add £100 for an intel port multiplier, £40 for a super micro controller board for fans and PSU switching or if I went cheap then a budget PSU (not ideal), £30 HP port multiplier and a paperclip mod for the PSU. Either way it's not that different in price to a purpose built shelf, it's £180ish upwards for a 4243, an MSA60 went for a ton earlier.
From what i've read, they'll handle standard SATA drives and the usual LSI HBA's are perfectly capable - it's just got to present the drives to the OS, feature licensing/cDOT isn't really a consideration, SAS to QSFP+ and you're good to go.
Didn't realise used was an option, two parity drives would concern met greatly for that many datat drives...
New on this budget isn’t happening. Parity wise I take your point, but RAID in itself is not a backup strategy, anything important is going to have at least a secondary backup on site and a remote. The beauty of Unraid is even in the event of a 3 drive failure you only loose the contents of the 3rd drive. Would I run this way in a production environment? Absolutely not, but for a home set-up it’s vastly more resilient than most.