Hdd Expansion bay appropriate for use with ZFS?

[ezekiel.incorrigible]

I'm building a large storage array (~100TB) and trying to find appropriate hardware. I have seen these expansion bays around eg. The HP D600 but I'm not clear exactly how these work - does the host computer see the individual drives or just one massive abstraction? Would such an expansion bay be appropriate to use with ZFS?


link:
https://www.serversdirect.co.uk/p/1...rage-enclosure-1-bays-sas-0-x-hd-rack-mountab
docs:
https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetD...kspecs&doclang=EN_US&searchquery=&cc=uk&lc=en

 

[Chris Moore]

The documentation spends a lot of time talking about specific hardware raid controllers from HP, but this appears to be a simple disk shelf that would present individual drives to the SAS controller. It should work.
You would need a SAS controller to connect it to as well as cabling, are you familiar with that hardware?

 

[ezekiel.incorrigible]

I'm not familiar with this kind of hardware, no. I guess I have some homework to do! Any pointers in the right direction would be appreciated :)

 

[Chris Moore]

It appears that this enclosure can have one of several array controllers integrated in it. If there is an array controller integrated in the one you have pointed out, that would be bad, but the listing does not appear to specify.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

I have both an HP D2600 (12 x 3.5") and and HP D2700 (25 x 2.5") both connected with an LSI 9207-8e. It sees each individual drive. I have also seen older Netapp disk shelves for sale on eBay, but I haven't used those.

 

[Chris Moore]

This is a quick intro to SAS disk interfacing, but there is a massive amount of information to take in and almost every vendor does things a little differently

Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/don't-be-afraid-to-be-sas-sy.48/

 

[ezekiel.incorrigible]

I have both an HP D2600 (12 x 3.5") and and HP D2700 (25 x 2.5") both connected with an LSI 9207-8e. It sees each individual drive. I have also seen older Netapp disk shelves for sale on eBay, but I haven't used those.

I read in the docs that
"Maximum storage capacity of 7.2 TB SAS (600GB SAS) or 72TB SAS MDL or SATA
MDL (4TB SAS or SATA HDD) per enclosure scalable to 57.6 TB SAS, or 576
TB SAS MDL or
SATA MDL."

What kind of drives do you use? I've just seen that I've got a max. total capacity with this of 7.2TB unless I want to spend a lot of money on MDL drives.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

What kind of drives do you use?

I have 12 x 2TB (7.2K MDL) SAS drives in the D2600, and 25 x 300G (dual port 10K) SAS drives in the D2700. They are both 6G SAS enclosures, so I am sure they will both take bigger drives. All mine are used from eBay. My experience in general has been good with used drives, but I always keep several spares handy as used drives have already exhausted at least part of their useful life. These enclosures are both on my backup NAS, but I used the D2700 as my primary one for several years. The only tricky part is you have to hook the enclosures to an HP RAID card to update the firmware on them if you care to do so. I did that, but I don't expect to see much more in the way of firmware updates since these arrays are older.