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After completing the first DAS/ SAS Expander JBOD enclosure project I realized that there was a major area of improvement. Using less than 30% of a large 4U case’s volume for useful purposes seemed like the key area to improve upon. As I was completing that build I soon realized that I wanted a secondary server to be able to access some of the drives for EXSi or Hyper-V virtual machines. Further, NAS operating systems that run poorly in virtual machines, such as unRaid require dedicated server for testing. I could have built another server in another enclosure, but I decided that I could improve upon the original design and access drives that are housed in the Big WHS ecosystem through a simple cable swap. This eliminates the need to physically move drives from enclosure to enclosure. The following is a slightly (approximately $20) more expensive version of the original Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure with a HP SAS Expander iteration.

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Oftentimes, users running file servers such as Windows 2008 Server R2, Windows Home Server, Linux variants (including Openfiler), OpenSolaris, FreeBSD (including FreeNAS), and so forth will require more storage than their server can physically store. One option is to add more servers to the SAN. Another option is to add more storage to an existing server. Adding a second (or third) enclosure for additional disks is a great option. This allows a server administrator to build a massive DAS storage system very inexpensively for applications like iSCSI, backup storage, media storage, virtual machine storage, and etc. Oftentimes, the ensuing research will lead IT professionals to JBOD DAS enclosures with SAS expanders built in.

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I have decided to post a little roadmap of what’s next on the site. I am a list making person, so this will hopefully keep me goal oriented. The next few weeks I will be focusing on some Windows Home Server add-in reviews and guides, some Linux/ OpenSolaris on Hyper-V guides, and some hardware testing. Other potential thoughts I have are to write up how to get decent network performance from a WHS (i.e. over 90MB/s which it seems like there are people who can’t figure this out). I may also move into trying some ESXi virtualization guides, some FreeBSD/ OpenSolaris ZFS guides, and some hardware reviews and benchmarks.

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