5018a-ftn4 1U build sanity check

[hakamairi]

Dear TrueNAS experts,
I'm doing my first build and I think I'm doing some cowboy management on it.
My main motivation was to run pfSense and maybe TrueNAS in a separate VMs, but after a lot of reading I decided to go with TrueNAS on bare metal and pfSense in a VM with a pass through for 3 of the ethernet ports (main, failover and local lan).

The rack I've got off ebay is 5018a-ftn4, with A1SRI-2758F mobo in it, 2 SATA3, 4 SATA2 ports, 200W PS (ECC sodimm was a nasty surprise).
Now after some reading I thought LSI HBA pci2 x8 extension could be useful so I bought Dell H200 IT mode flashed one, would that even work on it? Anyone tried this already? The part will arrive mid Jan so I will know for sure then. But I already start to wonder about the extra power cable that's attached to it on the pictures (2 wire, 4 pin connector), nothing in manual for it and my mobo doesn't have extra power ports on it.

I plan to do 32GB of RAM, also waiting for the parts.
2x 128GB SSD for TrueNAS OS.
For the pool I wanted to go with RAIDZ2 with a bunch of 512GB SSD drives. I could go with 8 for start, this way I should have all of them on SATA3. Around 2TB of usable storage is enough for me.

But at this point I start to wonder if the power supply will manage and if I'm not expecting too much of it.

Would a build like that work? What issues should I anticipate?

 

[jgreco]

Ah, well, I hate to potentially be the ruiner of dreams.

A 5018 style chassis can handle up to 4 2.5" drives. In doing so, there is reduced clearance for expansion cards, which share the same bay space. The H200 will come with vertical orientation, pointing SFF8087's and cables at those HDD bays, so even if the H200 fits, the cabling probably won't (I'm doing the assembly bit in my head here, so, who knows, COULD be wrong). I believe the 200W PSU comes with two drive power connectors, which could conceivably be split to 4, which is a cabling mess but not impossible.

The only way I can picture this POSSIBLY working, and boy I dunno, would be with M.2 SATA.

If you do not buy the Supermicro drive brackets, I think there's PROBABLY enough space on the right hand side to pull a bit of a stunt. If you were to get two Silverstone SDP11 or Startech SDP35S24M2NGFF boards, one could find some 6/32 spacers that were 1.5" tall, and screw one of these PCB's upside down on top of the other unit. Then use doublesided tape to mount it as far right in the chassis as you can. This gives you space to store 8 M.2 SATA SSD's, powered with only two SATA power leads, and I *think* there would be enough space for an H200 and cabling. An H310 might be better.

By mounting one of them upside-down, you would leave some room for the SAS cables to extend in between the units and not have to sharply bend.

This is not a build I have done. It is the hypothetical thing I would try given the parts constraints you've provided. I am very familiar with all the parts, but don't have a 5018 available to try for fit.

 

[hakamairi]

Thanks @jgreco,
If just the space is the issue I could re fit this into some other case. (even 2U deeper one that would fit into 60cm deep rack cabinet)
From what I read m.2 drives are more power hungry, so the power budget for those might not be enough with 200W PSU.

 

[jgreco]

From what I read m.2 drives are more power hungry,

I haven't seen that to be a big thing for SATA M.2. The difference for 2TB M.2 vs 2.5 860 Evo is half a watt peak (4.5W vs 4.0W)

Samsung 860 EVO | Consumer SSD | Specs & Features | Samsung Semiconductor Global

860 EVO delivers 2.5-inch, M.2, mSATA form factors and capacities ranging from 250GB to 4TB. Download 860 EVO firmware, driver, and more.

www.samsung.com

Whereas the NVMe based Samsung 980 Pro 1TB peaks out at 8.9W.

Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 SSD | Samsung Semiconductor Global

Samsung 980 PRO delivers the best performance in heavily loaded environments such as gaming and graphics with the PCIe 4.0 speeds. Available from 250GB to 2TB.

www.samsung.com

This makes sense as the SATA is speed-limited. It looks like for 8x 860 Evo 2TB and an H200, you'd be looking at around a 50W power tax to add 8 SSD's and the HBA.