I am looking for some options for a 2U rackmount chassis with 8 bay. I had originally been eyeing the UNAS NSC-800 case (mainly for the looks), but thinking it through, my all time dream would be to have a small rack that would consolidate all my home lab equipment. For the amount of the case, I may as well just go for a rackmount chassis. However, the options seems to be limited for something around $200-250, with hotswap bays, quiet and aesthetically pleasing. I found online that iStarUSA has a M-280-MATX which looks the best to my liking, but it looks expensive and no pricing information at all. The only other options seems to be the Norco RPC-2208. I'm wondering if anyone else have any suggestions.
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2U Rackmount 8 Bay Chassis
- Thread starter eroji
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I recently deployed one of these http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=11-152-478
(CSE-825TQ-563LPB)
It was nice, basic entry-level case with psu. The TQ backplane wiring can get messy though.
It also comes with rails.
(CSE-825TQ-563LPB)
It was nice, basic entry-level case with psu. The TQ backplane wiring can get messy though.
It also comes with rails.
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Darren Myers
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My votes the supermicro 2U 12 bay. Heres an empty one (well kinda empty), or heres one that is ready to go pretty much. Just needs a M1015 :P
GrumpyBear
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rackmount and quiet are usually mutually exclusive unless you get an enclosed rack with sound deadening and figure out how to quietly force air in ( cold zone) the front and vent it out the back (hot zone).
Rackmount means passive coolers on the CPUs and more air velocity/pressure to force air past tightly packed HDD and over the CPUs. More velocity in a smaller fan means lots more noise. Think of the sound of a 747 taking off at boot up.
GrumpyBear
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If you want quiet and just 8 bays then you might want to consider a 4u rack able tower as they typically support larger, quiter fans. Something like the SC743T from SuperMicro. Typically a bit more than your budget to buy new but MrRackables on eBay has them occasionally. There are other options such as the Norcos but you will see great polarization in opinions about those.
Darren Myers
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Does it need to be hot swappable? I have 2 of the Norco RPC 450B , it accepts x2 120mm fans in the front 2 drive cages, i modified my 2 cases so i was able to put a 120mm in the middle as well.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I was thinking 2U primarily because the motherboard I had in mind ASRock C2750D4i would be plenty for my build and usecase. It is passively cooled, and the 2U cases I looked at mostly had 80mm fans that I can swap out for quieter ones. The only consider was for PSU. Since it's for homelab setup, I am not looking for redundant power, so a single 2U low noise PSU or a case that accepts standard ATX PSU would be perfect.
The ASRock C2750D4I and C2550D4I have 6x Intel SATA ports and 6x Marvell. The Marvell ports are currently slow to unstable to the point of pool unavailability. Our recommendations for >6 SATA Ports are the Supermicro X10SL7-F and the ASRock E3C224D4I-14S.
GrumpyBear
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Depends on what you want to do with the NAS. Xeon and low powered are usually mutually exclusive terms
For SMB/CIFS using Samba you want a fast clock speed as it is single threaded. I'm running a E3-1231v3 and am able to saturate GigE copying files. Plex tends to want more horsepower for multiple high def streams. You mentioned homelab so if you are planning on iSCSI someone else may have input.
In general FreeNAS uses little CPU but a lot of RAM. A lot of people are running celerons and Pentiums with no issues. I went with the second slowest haswell Xeon as Im running Plex and I wanted 8 threads rather than the 4 that the 1220 had for future proofing. 45w TDP on the 1231. My system consumes 75w idle and 135 to 160w under load with 8 3TB disks
The main use of the server will be for NFS and secondary datastore for ESXi. I will be putting a 10GbE fibre card in it for a direct link to the ESXi host. It will be a total of 8 4TB drives in there and 32GB of RAM. I am not sure about the Plex part yet, I may just keep it virtualized if it would be taxing the CPU too much. The main appeal of the C2750 was that according to various reviews, it was fast enough to handle 8 drives yet very power efficient.
Exploring my options, I just saw this Lenovo TS440 server with Xeon E3 1245 V3. I am not sure if it comes with an onboard LSI 9240 i8 or seperate card though, but if the card is seperate and there are some onboard SATA slots, it would be cheaper to just take the motherboard and CPU out, as well as the PSUs and slap them into a rackmount chassis no?
Don't buy low-power CPUs. They are limited in their maximum power usage, which is seldom the case with a FreeNAS system. Whilst idling all CPUs downvolt/clock to the same level, so you only pay more for less crunch when you really need it. Also the E3-1225 v3 uses <50W under full load on all 4 cores.
E3-1220 v3 for entry-level or E3-1241 v3 if you need more performance. You will find that Xeon E5 systems aren't that much more however.
An interesting combination might be http://www.supermicro.nl/products/system/2U/5028/SYS-5028R-WR.cfm together with 2x http://www.supermicro.nl/products/nfo/SATADOM.cfm for FreeNAS boot. No additional SAS card needed, the board has 10x Intel AHCI SATA onboard.
E3-1220 v3 for entry-level or E3-1241 v3 if you need more performance. You will find that Xeon E5 systems aren't that much more however.
An interesting combination might be http://www.supermicro.nl/products/system/2U/5028/SYS-5028R-WR.cfm together with 2x http://www.supermicro.nl/products/nfo/SATADOM.cfm for FreeNAS boot. No additional SAS card needed, the board has 10x Intel AHCI SATA onboard.
The load will be light to average. I contemplated on E5 but it really seems overkill for the the usecase, not to mention likely way over my budget. Again, the Lenovo ThinkServer TS440 seems like a good base to convert into a rackmount server with reasonably quick E3 1245 V3. I believe the server comes with onboard SATA and another LSI 9240 i8, which can be flashed into IT mode for HBA use. That will allow me to have ZIL, L2ARC (maybe) and 8 HDDs. Maybe someone can point out anything I may have overlooked.
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Some OEM motherboards occasionally have proprietary connectors for power, so double-check that before trying to move it to a standard ATX chassis.
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Ignore all this, I mistread 440 as 140.
The TS140 is one of those proprietary boards, however I've linked this before:
http://www.jonkensy.com/lenovo-ts140-as-esxi-and-nas-box-with-a-twist/
And here's a premade harness like the one he made:
http://www.moddiy.com/products/IBM-Lenovo-PSU-Main-Power-24%2dPin-to-14%2dPin-Adapter-Cable-(30cm).html
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