Add SSD to SM 2U Chassis

[rmccullough]

I have the following chassis: Supermicro 2U (CSE-826A-R1200LPB) 12x 3.5" Drive Bays

This unfortunately is the chassis that does not have the two 2.5" trays on the back.

I would like to add at least one 2.5" SSD.

Can I retrofit this chassis to have those 2 bays on the back?
Would it be worth using a caddy adapter like this one from Fenlink?
Or am I best off looking to replace the chassis entirely?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Doesn't your mainboard have one M.2 slot or two? If not, but if you have

• at least one empty PCIe x8 slot and
• your mainboard and BIOS can do 4x4 bifurcation for that

you might be interested in this product: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SLG3-2M2.php

 

[rmccullough]

@Patrick M. Hausen, board is Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+. It looks like it has 1 (x8) PCI-E 3.0 slot.

I am not sure if it supports 4x4 bifurcation. Will research a bit.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

You can use one SSD with that card without bifurcation. Only needed for two.

 

[Etorix]

I am not sure if it supports 4x4 bifurcation. Will research a bit.

"Research" here should be no more than booting the motherboard to BIOS setup and exploring options under "PCIe Configuration" (or the like).

 

[Rand]

Actually for the X9 series that was not so simple as some board versions have gotten the capability in newer bios levels and some not ...
Also might be dependent on board HW level...

SMCI X9 Bifurcation I Why some boards but not all ?

I don't mean to beat a dead horse as this topic has been much discussed (190 search results), but it seems as though there is not a definitive answer as to the question: Do SMCI X9 motherboards support bifurcation? Answers to that question run the gamut: (1) "Hell Yeah," (2) "Only on days that...

forums.servethehome.com

 

[Etorix]

That seems to be a good reason to investigate on the actual BIOS rather than browsing through manuals and documentation… Provided that the server may be taken down for a moment while tinkering.

 

[Rand]

Provided he has the latest Bios version deployed *and* Bios options correlate to capability (no idea, never ran X9) then your are spot on :)

 

[rmccullough]

Would I be foolish to use that card and move my jails and VMs there without setting it up mirrored? Can I get away with snapshots over to my pool? Or is the smart money to just buy a matched pair of NVMe drives and setup the card once as a pool where both drives are in a mirrored vdev?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I have one colleague's system setup like that. Jails and VMs on a single SSD without redundancy. I'd recommend:
- use a brand name SSD with good write endurance (TBW).
- snapshot and replicate to your main pool built from e.g. HDDs with RAIDZ2 - there is a builtin mechanism for that in TN, accessable through the UI.

In my opinion setup this way your data is safe - you can replicate every hour, no problem. What you lose is availability, if the shit hits the fan. But that might be tolerable for a private system ...
You would need to replace the broken SSD, replicate manually the other way round, reconfigure your jails ... two or three days including the time until you get a new SSD delivered. But your data will always be safe.

 

[rmccullough]

Amazon has a 500GB WD Blue that recently dropped in price. Seemed like a good deal, but I don't follow the market closely. For the cost, it may make the most sense to just purchase 2, set them up mirrored. Then I get redundancy and wouldn't be down if the drive fails. Would still probably setup snapshots to my spinning disk pool and such.

In a mirrored vdev, would I get better read performance of reading 1/2 the data from each disk?

 

[ChrisRJ]

I am running my VMs from a single SSD (Samsung EVO 860) here with fully daily and hourly delta backups (although not on the FreeNAS box but a dedicated XCP-ng machine). For worst case, there is a cold standby machine. So yes, there would be a downtime. But I can live with that in a private and SMB scenario.