SuperChassis 847E16: MB/CPU/HDs recommendations

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tvsjr

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The only 8TB drives around right now are the helium-filled units or the shingled "archive" drives. The He drives are spendy, the archive drives slow and not rated for NAS service.

The 6TB drives are typically recommended. BTW, you can run SATA drives just as easily as SAS. Recommendations are typically the HGST and WD Red drives - Seagate hasn't quite gotten rid of the bad taste in many people's mouths after the debacle over their 2 and 3TB drives.
 

jgreco

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And WD hasn't quite gotten rid of the bad taste in people's mouths after the various Green debacles.

Either way, enjoy the lemonade, straight from the toilet bowl. :tongue:
 

tvsjr

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And WD hasn't quite gotten rid of the bad taste in people's mouths after the various Green debacles.

Either way, enjoy the lemonade, straight from the toilet bowl. :p
Fortunately, it's been long enough (plus a name change) that most people have forgotten about the Deathstars... therefore, HGST it is! :)

In reality, the fact the drives work at all is pretty damned amazing, when you start considering the tolerances at work within and the incredible areal density...
 

jgreco

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Fortunately, it's been long enough (plus a name change) that most people have forgotten about the Deathstars... therefore, HGST it is! :)

In reality, the fact the drives work at all is pretty damned amazing, when you start considering the tolerances at work within and the incredible areal density...

I was fine with not blaming the Deathstar thing on WD, especially seeing as how some of the HGST drives had recently turned out to be the most reliable option.
 

tvsjr

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Yep. I'm running 7 of its slightly-smaller brother, the HS724040ALS640 (4TB, 7.2K, 6Gbps SAS), and they work quite well.

It is a 7200RPM drive, so it will be a bit faster but also run hotter and consume more power than, say, a WD Red, or other 5900/5400RPM drive.
 

jgreco

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You're probably better off with nearline SAS drives, or even SATA drives, running at 5400/5900 RPM. They run cooler and will last longer. The incremental speed gain from a 7200 RPM drive minimizes quickly as the number of drives increases; a NAS, even with a 10Gbps connection, usually lacks the throughput capability to benefit from that unless you're doing something stressy like VM storage. For media storage, the 7200's are probably a loser.
 

jgreco

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Well, you kinda have to decide. Media and backups are a very different style of use (big contiguous files) than VM disk files. If you're only going to run maybe one VM then it probably isn't a big deal.
 

jgreco

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Please tell me if I need to buy any cables. I will be hooking up 2 ssd for the OS and 6 HGST Ultrastar 7K6000 HUS726060AL4210 and AOC-USAS2-L8E.
I never worked before with SuperMicro servers before (CSE-847E16-R1K28LPB). And easily can miss something or get wrong part.

Skip the headache of the AOC-USAS2-L8E. Get an LSI 9211-8i for maximum enjoyment, or if on a budget, try finding an IBM ServeRAID M1015. We know for sure that the latter two are fairly easily flashable to IT mode with the correct firmware and work flawlessly.

Take a look at the SAS primer https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...-sas-sy-a-primer-on-basic-sas-and-sata.26145/ to learn more about the cabling, etc.
 

Tenek

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jgreco, thanks again.
Ok, I will get LSI 9211-8i
Let me clarify:
Assuming that 90% of my server usage will be continuous streaming (+encoding/decoding) and 10% work with small files/VMs (which is not a big deal) -
you are saying that ST6000NM0014 will (potentially) live longer and eat less power than HGST Ultrastar 7K6000 HUS726060AL4210?
If we are on the same page, I will get ST6000NM0014, price is the same anyway :).

Thank you for the link about cabling. As far as I understand each HDD will be plugged in directly to back-pane (no need for cables here). The only cable necessary is for connection between HBA controller and back-panes?
Sorry for noob questions :). I will read in more details that link you provided.
 

tvsjr

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Tenek

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tvsjr, did you mean both SATA drives?
I was planning to stick with SAS drives if possible. I read before about some issues between SAS Expander <-> SATA drives.
 

tvsjr

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I've got an 847 chassis sitting next to me (see my sig) running a mix of SAS (all the big drives) and SATA (boot and SLOG SSDs) with no issues. I only went with SAS drives because they were available for free. You should have no issue mixing SAS and SATA drives on the same backplane.
 

tvsjr

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I would go with the HGST simply because I've had good luck with them so far, and I got bit by the Seagate issues a while back... but, both drives are basically equivalent.

@jgreco - good point, there are some weird edge cases where mixing doesn't work well. For my experience with the 847 chassis and the SAS2 expander backplanes, I've never had an issue.
 

Tenek

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Noob question: Do I connect both back-panes to single HBA controller (using two cables). Or I connect both outputs to 24 bay back-pane and cascade it to the 16 bay pane?
 
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