External JBOD Enclosures - What are you using?

[sfcredfox]

Greetings,

I am interested in any good rackable JBOD enclosures people in the community are using.

I'd like to know things like:

• What external enclosures are you using?
• If you're using SAS or SATA in your enclosure?
• The connectivity method you're using (SFF-8088, etc.)?
• The type of drives you're using (Consumer drives or new enterprise/ebay enterprise)?

Background:
I am currently using an HP MSA70 (25 2.5" drive bays, connected to an LSI SAS controller via SFF-8088). It has it's built-in expander allowing the 25 drives, and supports pass-through, so you can connect two of these in series I believe (using HP P800 or other supported cards, need clarification on using LSI, though I suspect it doesn't care).

Pros of the MSA70:

• Drive density is OK. 25 in 2U (there's probably products that do better, but are they as cheap?)
• eBay cost is decent-ish (~$250)
• Everything (drives) is hot-swappable assuming you have a good controller, no downtime
• Cabling is minimal with single SFF-8088
• Plenty of used spindles everywhere (SAS and SATA)

Cons of MSA70:

• 2.5" drives are more expensive for much less capacity than consumer drives
• You'll need more drives for capacity unless you buy really expensive ones, though that can lead to better performance in certain cases

Because of the cost of the drives, I am thinking of continuing capacity expansion in tier 2 using the MSA60 (12 3.5" bays). For capacity over performance, the SATA drives are a little cheaper than the 2.5". The SATA however is limited to SATA2 speeds in that enclosure; Not really concerned since it's more about capacity then speed in my tier 2.

I'd like to know if you can stuff consumer 4TB drives in HP 3.5" sleds and jam those in there?
I am curious is anyone has tried this?

Scope of this discussion/interest
This isn't a 'Should you use external?' discussion; It's a 'You're doing external, so which products are the best options and known to be working well' discussion.

I am interested in options for adding drives when you have no more capacity in your case. I'd like not to see arguments of external versus internal (such as high capacity SuperMicros). I think that should be a separate discussion if it should be discussed.

 

[sfcredfox]

I found a related post here also:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/extending-storage-with-external-raid-case-zfs.1358/