6+ Bay Enclosure Recommendation

[EvilishBob]

Hello all,

I am looking for some advice. I was initially looking at something like this Mediasonic USB 3.1 8 Bay enclosure, but I quickly gathered from these forums that USB is not a preferred method for TrueNAS. I have a Dell T7500 running Proxmox, and I am going to run TrueNAS in a VM. I already have 8x 6TB Western Digital Red HDDs ready to go. The T7500 only has 4x 3.5" bays that are already full.

Dell Precision T7500

• CPU - 2x Intel Xeon X5670 6-Core 2.93GHz Processor
• RAM - 192GB ECC RAM
• Available PCI-E slots
  • PCI x8 Gen 2
  • PCI x16 Gen 2 (x8 Gen2)
  • PCI x8 Gen2
  • PCI x4 Gen1

Since I have a pretty beefy bare metal machine already, I would like to chuck the 8 WD Red drives into some sort of powered enclosure (DAS/JBOD/etc) and directly connect it to the T7500 somehow. Building a NAS seems like a waste to me. I will likely use ZFS2. It will be used for Plex, so some performance would be nice.

I am looking for a recommendation for some kind of enclosure, preferably powered, with at least 6 bays. I am willing to purchase an enclosure, PCI-E card(s), and any cables necessary. What do you guys recon?

 

[Arwen]

I can't recommend the following, as I have never used it, nor do I know of any one using it. But, it does seem to fit your requirement. Just don't use their hardware RAID cards, and keep the external cables as short as possible. Any of the LSI based SAS HBA cards that have 2 x 4e ports should work.
RocketStor 6418S 8-bay SAS/SATA Hot-Swappable Tower Enclosure

And you were right that ZFS and USB don't play well together over the long haul. Importing data from a USB drive, or performing a backup to a USB drive, okay, those do work.

 

[Redcoat]

8x 6TB Western Digital Red HDDs ready to go.

If those are WD60EFAX drives, they use SMR tech and don't play well with TrueNAS. The CMR drives in the table below are fine.

 

[EvilishBob]

@Arwen I see where you are going. That looks to be a perfect solution. Does this part list look correct?

Enclosure - 8-bay SAS

• HighPoint RocketStor 6418S 8-Bay

OR

• PC Pitstop J0806T 8-bay

PCI Express 2.0 LSI SAS Controller Card

• 9200-8e Controller Card

SFF-8088 mini-SAS cable

• Mini SAS SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 Cable (as short as possible)

@Redcoat Dude, I had no idea about the SMR drive issue. I read up on it after you sent this, thank you! I almost had an FML moment, but it looks like my drives are WD60EFRX. Interestingly they aren't labeled as "Plus", but they are definitely "EFRX" model. These should work with ZFS since they are CMR, correct?


Does this parts list look correct? This hardware is all relatively new to me. Are there preferred brands for cards or cables I should look for (or ones I should stay away from)? I appreciate your help. I am excited to get this put together and up and running.

 

[Arwen]

For the 2 - 8 bay enclosures, either one seems to be suitable. They have built in power supplies, 2 x 4 lane SAS / SATA connectors, fans, and no built in RAID controller.

The cable depends on the connectors needed, so I can't comment except that yes, 0.5 meter long cable is MUCH better for SATA drives than a 1.0 meter long cable, (which might give trouble).

As for the LSI SAS controller card, that seems to be the right type. But, it has been too long since I researched such. You want one that is not MegaRAID, which the one you list is not, so good so far. But, you should check the Resource or sticky threads here in the forum for the supported models.

Glad your WD Red drives are CMR. I own a Seagate SMR 8TB drive and use it with ZFS for my backups. The firmware on this Seagate drive does not seem to have any firmware bugs. Their is a nasty WD Red SMR firmware bug that ZFS triggers for initial reads. After the entire drive has been written, that particular bug is no longer a problem. But, what the *ell Western Digital??