Tag Archive | "HP SAS Expander"

PE-2SD1-R10-1 PCMIG 1U Backplane with PCIe Slot

SAS Expanders, Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure and Save – Iteration 2 – A Better Solution

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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Posted in Non-drive Components, The Big WHSComments (8)

Big_WHS_Supermicro

The Big WHS: A Big Mother(board) Change of Plans

This week the Big WHS underwent a major change and dropped the Asus motherboard in favor of a Supermicro one. Apparently the Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard does not like the HP SAS Expander at all. I could not find a card that could see the SAS Expander. This all culminated when I finally took the working setup out of the Gigabyte H55 board and couldn’t get it to work in the Asus. For those wondering, yes, it was a $200 motherboard/ CPU with 36 raid ports + another 5 onboard and 1 esata. Windows Home Server v1 can only support 32 drives so that is a lot of connectivity at about $660!

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Posted in The Big WHSComments (8)


Server Parts

Image of Intel 3420 LGA1156 Qc MAX-32GB DDR3 Atx 2PCIE8 PCIE4 Pci Lan 2GBE Supermicro X8SIL-F
Image of Supermicro Add-on Card AOC-SASLP-MV8 - Storage controller - 8 Channel - SATA-300 / SAS - 300 MBps - PCI Express x4 Supermciro AOC-SASLP-MV8