SAS Without Backplane

[DaAwesomeP]

Hello!

My question is, how do I do SAS without a backplane? Are cables like this one safe, or is this similar to a Molex-to-SATA-lose-all-your-data scenario?

https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-SFF-8087-SFF-8482/dp/B01BW1U1GS

I see I'm probably not going to get a redundant SAS route this way, but this is for home use and it's all internal so that's fine.

The full build is with a Dell Precision T1700. I'm looking at:

• Xeon (I forget which, but I checked that this board can do ECC RAM with it)
• Dell H200 in IT mode
• 32GB ECC 1600
• 5x HGST 10TB SAS
• 2x old SSDs for boot, or one boot and one cache
• 3 drive caddy w/ fan for 5.25 bay (with internal bay totals to 5x 3.5 bays)

Thanks!

 

[HoneyBadger]

Those are indeed the correct cables, commonly referred to as "forward breakout."

is this similar to a Molex-to-SATA-lose-all-your-data scenario?

These are "SATA-to-SATA" on the power front, and should be just fine. (They also appear to be a fair sight cheaper than the official Dell connectors.)

2x old SSDs for boot, or one boot and one cache

Depending on your use, you may not get any real value from the cache (L2ARC) device here; although it could be fairly harmlessly put into work as a metadata-only cache (different from a metadata-only special vdev)

Can you describe your overall workload and the types of files you'll be storing on this system? I'm assuming you'll be looking at RAIDZ for your pool (Z2?) The Precision single-sockets often came with Xeon E5-16xx series chips, which can draw a fair bit of power (130W+) under load, but should clock down at idle.

 

[DaAwesomeP]

These are "SATA-to-SATA" on the power front, and should be just fine. (They also appear to be a fair sight cheaper than the official Dell connectors.)

Sweet!

Can you describe your overall workload and the types of files you'll be storing on this system? I'm assuming you'll be looking at RAIDZ for your pool (Z2?) The Precision single-sockets often came with Xeon E5-16xx series chips, which can draw a fair bit of power (130W+) under load, but should clock down at idle.

Nothing bad. This will host some VMs with possibly a local web server and other small loads, regular backups of some machines, bulk media that isn't accessed much (i.e. family photos) and associated media/photos server. I may move my Home Assistant instance (currently a fanless thin client) to this machine if I feel like messing with the PCIe passthrough for USB. I was considering a pfsense VM, but I think that will be better on a separate machine.

I'll probably be running SCALE since the past two machines I have set up used it as well.

A Mini X would be perfect here but would cost be more than double what this will be. I'm definitely going to measure the power on this; my UPS makes this easy to measure hopefully it's not bad at idle. I am very certain it has some sort of E3-12xx v3.

 

[DaAwesomeP]

Oh also yes, definitely RAIDZ2.