BUILD PowerEdge T110 II advice needed

[schuberth]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forums and new to the FreeNAS. Until now I have been using OpenBSD with 8 stand alone drives as my storage. It does what it does good enough, mostly for media files and some personal stuff. I have a script that goes throguh all the drives and collects all media symlinks and that's exported as a Samba share, but I always wanted to have some more reliability and a single pool for my media. I was eyeing zfs for some time and finally got a chance to buy a cheap, unpacked PE T110 II. I didn't have much time to look into details and since it was cheap I went for it:

- Intel Xeon E3-1230 v2
- single stick of 8GB 1600MHz ECC DDR3, max of 32GB (4x 8GB)
- 4x 3.5" HDD trays, 2x 5.25" device bays
- motherboard with 5x internal SATA, 1x eSATA, and a H200 (LSI 9211-8i) included with the config

I re-flashed H200 into IT mode, put in some drives and did a test run with FreeNAS 9.10 - it works, all is good :) But, my original plan was to fill it woth 7-8x 4TB drives. I've got some nice Seagate ES 3 drives, 7 of them, and one HGST Deskstar 4TB. And here in lies my problem - how do I fill up this little baby with 7-8 drives? I was hoping that I coould take out the control panel and place a in 4-in-3 drive cage that I have handy into the device bays but that won't be possible without modifications.

I came up with following options. Please let me know what do you think or if there's another approach that I missed:

• rip out the control panel and cut the device bay cage to allow the 4-in-3 drive cage to be used. I'd lose my warranty so not to keen on this
• use 3-in-2 drive cage instead. AFAIK, all of the models I looked at use some kind of backplane, as opposed to 4-in-3 variation :(
• use external 4 drive bay and connect using eSATA. Is this recommended? How about performance? Will SMART work?
• suspend two HDDs in the device bay, and place down on the bottom of the case 1-2 HDDs (one would should fit, not so sure about the other one).

I also thought about gutting the server and placing to mobo in another case but it turns out it's mirrored desing - the expansion card slots are to the right of the back panel, not to the left as normal mobos are built.

I would really appreciate any input. Thanks!

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

use external 4 drive bay and connect using eSATA. Is this recommended?

Some members use eSATA successfully for backups, but this is not recommended for 24/7 use.

I would really appreciate any input.

To be blunt, if you want to run 7-8 drives, you need a box designed for 7-8 drives. Hacking a box designed for 4 drives will probably give mediocre results at best. I've tried it several times and always been dissatisfied with the outcome.

 

[danb35]

Some members use eSATA successfully for backups, but this is not recommended for 24/7 use.

I don't use eSATA, but as I understand it, the issue is less with using eSATA as such than with using SATA port expanders, which are pretty much invariably a bad thing. A single disk via eSATA should be just fine, but a multi-disk enclosure connected to a single eSATA port is going to be trouble.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Yes, but, eSATA connections have no lock and tend to be a bit wobbly, so even eSATA without a port multiplier is a bit too fragile for comfort IMO.

 

[sfcredfox]

You might have better luck with stuff like this in the future:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...920083?hash=item43f20fa3d3:g:msoAAOSw5VFWFvJa

This is only one example. It's usually not totally ideal because people don't need dual CPUs as it wastes power and generates heat, but the chassis are solid and if you pay close attention to the backplane, you can ususally get one that suites you, whether you want an expander or a straight thru model.

Using what you have, you might be able to add an adapter (internal to external) for some of those SATA ports and connect them to an external enclosure, but I don't have an example of that. Normally if you have enclosures to connect, it's better to use another HBA and a SAS 8088 cable, but that's more money you'd have to spend just for four more drives, eh.