28 replies to this topic

[+CPressland]

Hey Guys,

I'm planning on building a new server soon with approx 15 Hard Drives, I'm looking for a fairly decent case with 9 x 5.25 slots which I can fill with these suckers: CSE-M35T-1B



Does anyone have any recommendations for cases I should buy?

Additionally any personal recommendations for RAID Cards / Motherboards?

Thanks Guys,

Chris

[cybertimber2008]

Check out this blog article: http://blog.backblaz...g-more-secrets/
Now, i'm not saying build one of those... but they do have some good recommendations as far as RAID Cards and mobo that should prove useful to you.

[Crisps]

Lian Li PC-A77FB

[metallithrax]

http://www.nexsan.co...tech-specs.aspx

[AJerman]

First, who is this for, you or a company? And what is the budget? 15 drives inside one machine is pushing just about any case I've seen to it's limits, though I'm sure you could find something if you looked hard enough. At 15 drives I'd be looking more towards an external storage system with perhaps a fiber channel connection to your server, but then you're starting to talk more expensive solutions. If you do try to put it all inside one system, you'll almost definitely want (if not need) separate controller cards for the drives. I don't even know what motherboards would support that many drives, and if they did, it would probably require sharing channels and mean performance degredation. Additionally, I don't think many onboard RAID controllers can handle that many drives and handle them efficiently. You'd be talking an actual enterprise server by then which would also get expensive.

I'm thinking something kind of like this: http://www.ebay.com/...=item2ebabe7379

Honestly, I had no idea they were so incredibly cheap online. I guess because they are so old and SATA and everything enterprise is going SAS now. Although I deal with these every day, I don't really know much about all the different models there are, so you still might want to do a little research before you click buy now on that link. Regardless, that's the direction I would look rather than stuffing 15 drives in a case.

Slightly more educated edit: The DS4000 line has limited maximum storage, so you wouldn't be able to put terrabyte drives in it, which is why it's cheaper probably. You may want to look at other storage units, that was just the first to come to mind since i have a rack full of them next to me, but they are older and only have 300 GB drives. Unfortunately if you go for a storage unit that can accommodate more capacity, your price will probably go up rapidly.

[xendrome]

Yea, 15 drives in a RAID.. you need to invest in some type of enterprise storage... And if you or the company can't afford it you likely don't have any business or real need for putting together what you are trying to do.

[AJerman]

Yikes, I looked up the DS5100 which is another step up and allows (I think) 16 TB per unit, but it costs as much as a new BMW, haha. IBM's stuff is going to be very expensive though. You'd have to be a high demand enterprise customer for a lot of their stuff. Gives me a new appreciation for the entire rack of them next to me. Look at some other companies and see what they offer for external storage.

[TurboTuna]

Checkout this forum - http://lime-technolo....php?board=39.0 (its the unraid forums, if you're familiar with it)

[th3r3turn]

TurboTuna, on 03 February 2012 - 23:05, said:

Checkout this forum - http://lime-technolo....php?board=39.0 (its the unraid forums, if you're familiar with it)

Have used unraid before, create software! worth looking at.

[+CPressland]

Okay, this is for personal use, this'll be connected to my Server 2008 R2 box with iSCSI for Mass Storage and Backups.

I will be using the Lian Li PC-A77FB with 4 x CSE-M35T-1B giving me 20 Drives total.

Now I've just gotta find a motherboard and set of PCI-E SATA Controllers to run the system. Will likely be using FreeNAS or OpenFilier. I've had a look at Unraid but I simply can't get my head around the redundancy and technology aspects of it so will not be using it. RAID-Z on ZFS seams the most logical direction to go.

[TurboTuna]

Vegetunks, on 04 February 2012 - 00:31, said:

Okay, this is for personal use, this'll be connected to my Server 2008 R2 box with iSCSI for Mass Storage and Backups.

I will be using the Lian Li PC-A77FB with 4 x CSE-M35T-1B giving me 20 Drives total.

Now I've just gotta find a motherboard and set of PCI-E SATA Controllers to run the system. Will likely be using FreeNAS or OpenFilier. I've had a look at Unraid but I simply can't get my head around the redundancy and technology aspects of it so will not be using it. RAID-Z on ZFS seams the most logical direction to go.

Hmm, ZFS with that kind of storage you're going to need LOADS of ram or its going to be horrid. 32GB Would be best.

I'd really give unraid a go. You'll have to buy the pro licence for that many drives but well worth it.
The redundancy of unraid allows you to lose one drive - and keep going. Should you lose more than one drive, you only lose the data that is on those disks - your other data is perfectly accessible.

If you want ISCSI with that many drives maybe consider Raid10 and then openfiler for the ISCSI part. Depends what you want from the system, I guess.

[+Jdawg683]

metallithrax, on 03 February 2012 - 22:09, said:

http://www.nexsan.co...tech-specs.aspx

'
hilarious - perhaps if the dude has $100k

[+CPressland]

TurboTuna, on 04 February 2012 - 21:06, said:

Hmm, ZFS with that kind of storage you're going to need LOADS of ram or its going to be horrid. 32GB Would be best.

I'd really give unraid a go. You'll have to buy the pro licence for that many drives but well worth it.
The redundancy of unraid allows you to lose one drive - and keep going. Should you lose more than one drive, you only lose the data that is on those disks - your other data is perfectly accessible.

If you want ISCSI with that many drives maybe consider Raid10 and then openfiler for the ISCSI part. Depends what you want from the system, I guess.

Yes, I have read about the amount of Memory ZFS requires to run well. Regarding Unraid, I simply don't understand it in the slightest, I've read tons of guides and watched plenty of videos on it but it just won't sink in.

I just simply cannot get my head around it. Data isn't being mirrored across volumes, Shares can mount to a specific disk. I just want one massive pool of storage, I don't want to have to concern myself with which disk what file is on. Will setup in a VM and have a play now but I really don't understand this.

Jdawg683, on 04 February 2012 - 22:17, said:

hilarious - perhaps if the dude has $100k

Thats a negative! lol

[Vice]

I built the same thing you are doing a few years ago. I chose the Coolermaster Centurion 590. Then I stuck inside of it three of the 5x3.5" to 3x5.25" adapters.

Here is a picture from my build illustrating how it went together: http://i.imgur.com/6bjPI.jpg
And here is what it looked like inside giving you an idea of clearance to the motherboard: http://i.imgur.com/EaEGm.jpg

Now in that picture you can see I used a mATX motherboard. I later swapped that with a Gigabyte UD5 which is a full sized ATX board and it still fit perfectly fine. The great thing about this case is that it retails for £50 (or atleast did when I got it) and if you're considering adapter backplanes you know they are not cheap. Around £80-£100 each so getting a cheap case can take some of the bite out of it.

I later upgraded to a Lian Li PC343B which has 18x 5.25" slots (9 on each side, it's a perfect 18" cube case) and from that I was able to double up my total storage to 30 disks using 6 adapter Backplanes. This case however is quite a lot more expensive at £230 retail. It does however support 6 drives at the back not inside of any backplanes which is great for putting SSD's or a boot drive on away from the RAID storage.

Hope this helps.

[+CPressland]

Vice, on 06 February 2012 - 11:24, said:

I built the same thing you are doing a few years ago. I chose the Coolermaster Centurion 590. Then I stuck inside of it three of the 5x3.5" to 3x5.25" adapters.

Here is a picture from my build illustrating how it went together: http://i.imgur.com/6bjPI.jpg
And here is what it looked like inside giving you an idea of clearance to the motherboard: http://i.imgur.com/EaEGm.jpg

Now in that picture you can see I used a mATX motherboard. I later swapped that with a Gigabyte UD5 which is a full sized ATX board and it still fit perfectly fine. The great thing about this case is that it retails for £50 (or atleast did when I got it) and if you're considering adapter backplanes you know they are not cheap. Around £80-£100 each so getting a cheap case can take some of the bite out of it.

Now this is a genuinely helpful post, do you have any photos of the internals after wiring? A list of used PCI/PCI-E SATA Cards?

Thanks!!