24 bay SuperMicro server limits?

[Visseroth]

So I'm looking at buying a new server, well new to me but used and I'm curious if the backplane for the server will limit the size of the drives I can use.

I know the SAS RAID controllers limit the size of the drive(s) you can use but does anyone know if the backplane will be a limiting factor as well??

If I do buy a 24 bay server I'm looking at replacing the RAID controller with something like this......


of coarse I won't be running a hardware raid but instead the FreeNAS ZFS array but I want to be sure this isn't going to limit me to 2TB drives or smaller. I'm wanting to run 4 or 6TB drives with the ability to upgrade at later dates, hence the 24 bay server. 12 in use, 12 available to move data to a new pool so the old can be taken down.

Thought, ideas, input are all appreciated!

 

[danb35]

I'd doubt it would be a problem, but it's hard to say for sure without knowing what specific hardware you're talking about.

 

[Ericloewe]

SAS2 expanders have no generally-known size limit for drives. Same goes for SAS2 controllers.

If I do buy a 24 bay server I'm looking at replacing the RAID controller with something like this......

*BUZZER*

Wrong answer. That's an expander, that's what the backplane has (or might have). Think of it like a network switch, only for hard drives.

You still need an HBA - LSI SAS 9211, LSI SAS 9207, LSI SAS 9240 (crossflashed), IBM M1015 (crossflashed)...

 

[Darren Myers]

I just purchased one of the supermicro superchassis with 24 bays, its loud....and heavy, but thats to be expected. Check out the off topic build thread i have a picture of the guts of mine.

But yes dont get a raid card, use a M1015 or another above card that is FreeNAS supported, so far i havent bought or added any drives larger then 500gb (still testing it all) but i dont see an issue adding 4-6-8TB hdds

 

[Visseroth]

yea, I'm looking at a 4U Supermicro 846E1-R900B 24 Bay which has a BPN-SAS-846EL1 SAS Expander

Darren, I see you're running the 1200. Have you had a chance to test with anything 4TB or so?

Ericloewe, what do you mean crossflashed?

When I say backplane I'm referring to the board directly behind the drives that the drives plug into when slid into the server. Is my labeling of the parts wrong?

Basically I want to get a 24 or 36 bay server and make it 4+TB compatible

 

[Darren Myers]

I have not so far, I haven't been willing to bite the bullet on all the drives i need yet. I can see if i have one floating around but i dont foresee an issue, As per the crossflash in order to use the M1015 with FreeNAS it needs to be crossflashed to different firmware which is P16 IT Mode.

Theres a few various threads out there that say 4-6TB hdds are supported. The thread i read the guy was using a different backplane and his 6TB hdds were showing as 2TB drives, but that was due to a older raid/hba card

 

[Ericloewe]

Ericloewe, what do you mean crossflashed?

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/confused-about-that-lsi-card-join-the-crowd.11901/

When I say backplane I'm referring to the board directly behind the drives that the drives plug into when slid into the server. Is my labeling of the parts wrong?

Basically I want to get a 24 or 36 bay server and make it 4+TB compatible

That's the backplane. The backplane either exposes all individual drive connections or it has an expander, like the one you linked. It still needs an SAS controller.

LSI SAS2 stuff has no problems with current hard drive capacities. Only SAS1 stuff is limited to 2TB drives.

 

[Visseroth]

Here is the backplane that the SuperMicro has.....
These servers pretty much are a pass through. Direct SAS connection to each location in the hard drive bays through the backplane. So I guess with that a good controller would be where it is at which is what you guys have been saying.
But good to know on the SAS2 stuff.

Would that SAS controller I linked earlier not work? I agree getting something compatible is the best way to do it.

Darren, if you are able to get a hold of a 4+TB drive would you give it a shot and see if it even sees it? I'm extremely curious to know. I'm seriously considering pulling the trigger on that 24 bay server. Was almost half tempted to get a 36 bay but at twice the price I don't know that it's worth it. Then again going from a 16 to a 24 is a $200 to $300 increase as well. Maybe I should consider the 16 then and save the money for drives. After all a full server of 16 4TB drives is 64TB minus redundancy.

oh.... torn in so many directions, sigh!

 

[Visseroth]

I failed to add, correct me if I'm wrong. I don't learn anything if I'm not corrected.

 

[Visseroth]

seems the backplane is a multiplier of sorts...

Any suggestions?

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/BPN-SAS-846EL1_SAS_Expander_Backplane

 

[Ericloewe]

Here is the backplane that the SuperMicro has.....
These servers pretty much are a pass through. Direct SAS connection to each location in the hard drive bays through the backplane. So I guess with that a good controller would be where it is at which is what you guys have been saying.
But good to know on the SAS2 stuff.

Would that SAS controller I linked earlier not work? I agree getting something compatible is the best way to do it.

Darren, if you are able to get a hold of a 4+TB drive would you give it a shot and see if it even sees it? I'm extremely curious to know. I'm seriously considering pulling the trigger on that 24 bay server. Was almost half tempted to get a 36 bay but at twice the price I don't know that it's worth it. Then again going from a 16 to a 24 is a $200 to $300 increase as well. Maybe I should consider the 16 then and save the money for drives. After all a full server of 16 4TB drives is 64TB minus redundancy.

oh.... torn in so many directions, sigh!

What you originally linked is not an SAS controller! It's an SAS expander. An SAS expander only serves to connect a larger amount of drives than the SAS controller natively supports. You'd still need one (or more) SAS controllers.

Let's take the 24-bay chassis as an example. You have three options:

1. Get the backplane without an expander and use three SAS HBAs (LSI SAS 9211, for instance) to connect all drives individually to HBAs.
2. Get the backplane without an expander and use a single SAS HBA plus an SAS expander (like the one you linked earlier). Connect the HBA to some of the expander's ports and use the rest for the drives.
3. Get the backplane with an integrated expander. This is equivalent to 2, but is more elegant.

Again, any current size of hard drive will work on halfway-modern hardware.

 

[JayG30]

I assume you are looking at the;
4U Supermicro 24 bays Storage Server Chassis SC846E1-R900B 846EL1 SAS Expander
on Ebay per your comment above?

Just wanted to let you know that the 900W PSU that I've read quite a few people complain about the noise in the 900W PSU. Something about it buzzing constantly. The 1200W units seem to be completely quiet.

Also, that case has backplane with a SAS1 expander. It supports only 3Gb.

 

[Visseroth]

Jay, yes and thanks for chiming in! Very good info too as currently I have to sleep with the thing in the room, for now....

I've been looking at used hardware to help reduce cost as I don't want to throw 5 to 10K at a server, I don't have that kind of cash but I am willing to piece it together and spend 2K but was hoping to get 24 to 36 bays so I can not only expand but so I can actually rotate pools in the same box without transferring all the data to another server.

Currently I have a 12 bay server, all bays in use which makes it hard to rotate out drives and/or change their configuration without another server available to dump the data on.

Ericloewe, again, thank you for getting back to me as well. Yes I linked a sas card but what I didn't realize is that the backplane on the server is an expander until I looked closer at the pictures. On the server I have now all my hard drive ports are directly connected to a SAS cable which is directly connected to a sas port on the card. There are no sas expansion ports or multi-ports on my server, so that threw me off a bit.

According to the guy selling the server he says......

Code:

Hello thanks for the email,

the server's RAID controller is based off the motherboard

the motherboard has intel ICH10R controller which limits to 2TB Per Drive

the backplabe can handle upwards to 4TB

If you get a different RAID card and install in the server it can take larger drives, we have the awesome 9260-8i for $240 if you want to order it please let me know thanks

 

[Ericloewe]

Get an M1015 for 100-150 bucks, crossflash it and you'll have a nice SAS 2 controller that'll support larger drives.

 

[JayG30]

Sorry for the late response.

For a cheap HBA do an advanced search on ebay for either an M1015, H310, or H200). All three of these are based on the same LSI SAS2008 controller. All 3 can be flashed to IT mode. The M1015 is the most common and easiest from what I've always read. However the others aren't exactly difficult to do. You can get an H200 or H310 on ebay for less than $60. If you setup some alerts on ebay and wait you might snag one for like $45.

Eventually the 2308 controllers will flood the market and you will be able to get those for just as cheap.

For 2k you can get better than a chassis with a SAS1 backplane. I wouldn't personally touch anything less than a SAS2 backplane, especially with an expander and 24 disks.

 

[Ericloewe]

2k for an SAS1 chassis? You can get a new 24-bay 4U with an SAS3 backplane and redundant PSUs for that kind of cash.

 

[JayG30]

2k for an SAS1 chassis? You can get a new 24-bay 4U with an SAS3 backplane and redundant PSUs for that kind of cash.

lol no I think he (and I) meant 2k for the whole build. I'm going off his statement here:

I've been looking at used hardware to help reduce cost as I don't want to throw 5 to 10K at a server, I don't have that kind of cash but I am willing to piece it together and spend 2K but was hoping to get 24 to 36 bays so I can not only expand but so I can actually rotate pools in the same box without transferring all the data to another server.

With that type of budget I still feel you can get a 24bay chassis with a SAS2 backplane, along with all the other parts to build a reasonable server.

 

[Visseroth]

I ended up picking up a SC847E16-R1400LP for 1K.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E16-R1400LP.cfm

It needs additional hardware but came with a quad core that I'll be upgrading to a 6 core 3.47Ghz CPU, it came with 3GB of RAM that'll be swapped out for 32GB of RAM and comes with AOC-SASLP-MV8 controller cards which are SAS1 controllers.
Bonus was that the server came with a dual port RJ45 10Gb NIC that doesn't have any identifying markers on it other than ConRaid and a dual port SuperMicro AOC-STGn-I2. I am considering getting rid of one of them as I don't need 2 10GB dual port NICs but have been considering running a 10GB back bone between my virtual server and my NAS server and maybe my desktop so as to have high speed transfer rates.
In response to Ericloewe, I ment ~2K for about the whole setup, thus far I'm into it for about 1.5K and seems I'll be into it for almost 3 when I'm done

In regards to sas controllers, it seems I need to find a sas2 controller that supports large drives and probably a backplane as it is supposed to come with a BPN-SAS2-826EL1 backplane according to SuperMicro's site but instead has a sas-846a 24 port backplane on the front that is a port multiplier as it has SFF 8087 connectors just as the AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards.

I'll be emailing SuperMicro to find out more about this backplane and I may need to replace the backplane as well as the cards in order to support anything over 2.2TB.

More to come as I know more. Input and suggestions always appreciated.

 

[Darren Myers]

Well for the SAS controller, pick up a M1015. They support over 2TB harddrives.

 

[marbus90]

or Dell H200, LSI 9207-8i or 9211-8i