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After some prodding I am starting to do a few more chassis reviews. To continue on this theme, I recently purchased a Supermicro SC933T-R760B which is a 15 bay 3.5″ SAS/ SATA chassis with a triple redundant power supply. In 2010 low-cost 3U and 4U storage enclosures became popular DIY options. Those low cost enclosures like the Norco RPC-3116 lack power supplies meaning that a user can install a standard ATX power supply and have a working system. What these low-cost alternatives lack are the serviceability features commonly found in Supermicro, Dell, HP, and Chenbro enclosures that are meant to keep the servers online while being able to swap out not just drives, but also fans and power supplies. Read the full story

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 had heard rumors of 32 drives being the limit, so I figured, why not? I had more than 32 1.5TB and 2TB disks in hot swap bays, and could easily handle the connectivity. Plus, since I am booting the new WHS from a VHD, I knew that WHS could mount VHD’s meaning I could somewhat quickly test 32+ disks with VHD’s and 32+ physical disks, and also virtualized and standard configurations. See the below picture for what this looks like:

Here are a bunch of VHD's in Hyper-V that were used for testing

First off, this is not a typical WHS build, and it was not meant to be. For the majority of users, a HP MediaSmart (by far the WHS to get if you do not DIY the build) is the way to go. For my purposes, I have seen a consistent, but increasing 500-600GB/mo of extra disk usage. Just for the record, unlike the opinion of certain Seagate executives, it is not for material of questionable moral value. Alas, I needed a solution that would allow me to have one box that could be upgraded and used for up to 24 months. As mentioned in Part 1, this project is an upgrade project and therefore I had some parts, and had a good idea of what I was doing before embarking on the project.

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As high-performance hard drives move to the 2.5” form factor, a form factor that has been common in the SSD and notebook space, mounting these drives in traditional cases can be somewhat difficult. Purchasing 2.5” to 3.5” adapters allow system builders to mount a single drive to a space meant for a 3.5” drive, but that can be a serious waste of space.

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Needing a few more drives in the Windows Home Server, I opted for an “ICY DOCK MB453IPF-B 3 in 2 SATA/SAS Backplane Module – Retail” This unit allows for three 3.5″ drives to be installed into a case with two open 5.25″ bays. What should be noted, as with most drive cages, is that consumer level cases often have metal tabs in the drive bays to guide and hold large optical drives in-line. These tabs sometimes require that they are bent back to be flush with the plane of the vertical drive walls when installing multi-bay multi-drive enclosures. On the Norco 4U case, which is designed for these types of multi-bay enclosures, the unit slid in easily. Depending on the case, one may need to screw or use other attachment methods to secure the enclosure to the case.

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