BUILD HP DL380e 25x SFF suggestion

[maxysoft]

Hello guys, I'm new to the storage world and FreeNAS so forgive me if I'm wrong. In our company we are planning to make a proxmox cluster consisting of 4 nodes and a dedicated storage. We already have the servers for the various nodes and we have decided how to make the network but we still have the storage question. We do not have a big budget so we were thinking of buying an used HP DL380e G8 25x bay SFF with an LSI SAS 9207-8i HBA controller. In your opinion, is the HP server suitable for storage with that controller? We do not need a great performance for this we have opted for the WD Red 2.5". In case you can tell me something at the same price?
The specs of the DL380e:
- Xeon E5-2407 V2
- 32GB Ram
- 10x WD Red 1TB
Total cost: 800€ without discs.

Thanks a lot.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

HP makes sweet hardware. As long as you use an HBA instead of the RAID controller that typically comes with the HP DL series, you should be fine.

I'm hesitant to recommend 2.5" drives because they cost more for the same capacity and rarely come in capacities greater than 2TB.

Price seems about right if I'm converting Euros correctly. You can price check in USD at Orange Computers. They are typically a bit higher than eBay but do allow you to configure exactly the machine you want easily.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[RegularJoe]

if your going proxmox I understand you should look at the hyper converged storage.

For FreeNAS on your HP DL380e G8 I would suggest a PCIe 3.0 hba even though your using just 2 internal ports to drive the 25 poet sas expander. I would keep all expansion cards PCIe 3.0 and if you can get the HP 10 gig mezzanine card in the server I would go for it. If you ever do a FreeNAS storage that is all SSD I would suggest the 16 drive DL380 as each drive gets a dedicated SAS port and does not deal with a sas expander at all but you need a more pricey quad port(16i) card.

If your using 25 drives and NEVER want to deal with a failure you may want to look at using 3 way mirrors on FreeNAS.

 

[maxysoft]

Thanks giuys. After discussing we decided to take a 3.5 LFF server, probably an DL180 G6. I will let you know what we will decide

 

[JaimieV]

I built out a DL180 G6 (12 x 3.5" version) a couple of weeks ago, but I had to return it as it was too noisy for a domestic situation even hidden away in the cellar.

The builtin RAID doesn't have a JBOD/disk mode so you have to make each disk an array of one, and you completely lose any mapping from physical disk to /dev/disk entry in FreeNAS. Not even the serial number gets passed through, and you can't get the serial out of the RAID firmware as far as I could tell so it's pot luck replacing failed disks. So don't even consider using the built in RAID card.

Apart from that, it absolutely flew.

 

[otpi]

I built out a DL180 G6 (12 x 3.5" version) a couple of weeks ago, but I had to return it as it was too noisy for a domestic situation even hidden away in the cellar.

I have one of these (G6) unused in my cellar. I consider it too old (cpu/mb), dual socket and power draw is no good, and mine was free. And, the raid controller is not good for zfs.

@JaimieV Do you know is the backplane supports sas-2? i.e. does it support >2TB disks and 6G? I have considered putting new HW in it. (btw; you can short two of the pins on the fan connector of these HPs to trick it into believing the fan is present. With only 1 or two fans running the noise ok for cellars)

The builtin RAID doesn't have a JBOD/disk mode so you have to make each disk an array of one, and you completely lose any mapping from physical disk to /dev/disk entry in FreeNAS. Not even the serial number gets passed through, and you can't get the serial out of the RAID firmware as far as I could tell so it's pot luck replacing failed disks. So don't even consider using the built in RAID card.

Single disk array through these raid controllers is a disaster waiting to happen. You're probably better off using the HP raid than doing this.

 

[JaimieV]

The backplane on the DL180 6G supports 4TB disks as that's what I had in it, but I don't know further details. I wish I'd asked about the noise here, that fan trick might have made it worthwhile! With a new HBA, obviously.
I'd had it built with a couple of four core 40W Xeons (L5630) and 2x16gig low voltage RDIMMs, power draw with 12 disks in was acceptable at 150W. The cellar would appreciate the heat and airflow, to be honest...

 

[RegularJoe]

you can get a low power cpu, put only one in, do the fan trick and put in a LSI card. Those Xeon 5500 and 5600 CPU's and DDR3 are quite fast, the newer machines and buses are a little faster. PCIe4 or PCIe5 and the replacement to thunderbolt will drive more companies to upgrade.