BUILD Build based on "Pivot" or SuperMicro DB-B0012ST (UPDATE: Don't Do It)

[adamgoldberg]

What's the advice on building a FreeNAS on a 3U 12-bay DB-B0012ST, which seems to have a SuperMicro X7DBE, and a LSI SAS3081E-R?

I can't tell from photos, etc., what the backplane is but the SAS3081E-R has two mini-SAS connectors, so it'd support 8 drives directly (with fan-out cables), plus the several on the motherboard? I suspect it's not a SAS-expander backplane.

I'm a bit worried that the X7 is a bit old, should that bother me? With enough ECC RAM in here, and starting with one bank of 6x6GB RAIDZ2 with expansion to another 6 Z2 bank... seems like it'd give me enough expandability.

It makes me a little worried that I can't figure out which chassis this thing is based on, but it seems to be clearly a SuperMicro. The seller claims that it's similar to this one http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...641961?hash=item1eaa3559a9:g:iZ8AAOSwo0JWO6Vk, but I haven't seen it yet. I'll be seeing it tomorrow.

Anything I should look for/watch out for of SuperMicro stuff of this vintage? This may originally be a "Pivot DB-B0012ST", whatever that is/was. Very little information about Pivot seems to be available (or nearly none).

You guys rock, thanks for your help.

 

[ChriZ]

Don't know about this chassis; however what I do know is that SAS3081E-R does not support disks larger than 2TB.
So using 6TB disks with this controller is not possible.

 

[jgreco]

The 3081 is an LSI 3Gbps adapter, so will not be compatible with drives larger than 2TB. The X7 is indeed a bit old, and will eat a lot of power while it is busily slowing you to a huffy and puffy jog. It'll probably *work* but may not be worth the effort to make it work. The chassis might be worth refurb'ing, but the unit pictured appears to be based on an expander backplane. I don't see many LSI 3Gbps expanders these days, not really since the days of ~2TB drives, but you'll want to be cautious.

 

[adamgoldberg]

Seems like advice is: The MB may have enough oomph, and the chassis might be fine. But the LSI card won't be helpful, and the hard drive backplane, if it's an expander, puts the whole thing in a "not worth the bother" sort of place. If it's a -TQ sort of backplane, then maybe. This thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/41bws3/server_model_dbb0012st_with_bspsas2826el1/) seems to indicate that the chassis for this model number originally came with the BSP-SAS-826EL1 backplane, which puts this whole thing in the "not worth the hassle" area.

Does that about cover it?

 

[jgreco]

That's my conclusion.

 

[adamgoldberg]

So, I asked some pointed questions of the seller (based on the above), and it rapidly became clear to him that he wasn't going to be able to unload this dinosaur on me for nearly what he wanted for it (>$400), and we broke off negotiations.

Thanks a bunch for your fast help, all.

 

[jgreco]

If it was sufficiently cheap, it might be possible to rip out the backplane and do a retrofit, but in general that's not a beginner level project (no insult intended). The problem is that even those of us who do this stuff professionally aren't always sure of the specific quirks of a given revision of a chassis and what exactly the upgrade options are, and at $400 I'd say you'd be better off just camping out on eBay watching for something with a 6Gbps backplane.

The expander backplanes, by the way, are VERY nice in terms of cabling simplification.

 

[adamgoldberg]

If it were sufficiently cheap, sure. But in this case it wasn't, and there was some doubt (see the reddit thread above) as to whether this particular chassis had mounting holes that wouldn't work for the SAS2 expander.

My point in making the conclusion above was to warn others who google "freenas DB-B0012ST" that there were some real issues to consider.