DIY SAS enclosure part-agony

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cape

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Apr 6, 2013
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Hey everyone!
I'm in the slightly anxiety-provoking stage of starting to buy components for a home built SAS disk enclosure. The enclosure as planned will contain a SAS expander, two or three 8*2.5" HP backplanes (depending on expander capacity) and a power supply. This will then connect to my server (ESXi 5.1) via SFF-cabling to some RAID card. And now I'm trying to figure out a good combination.

After much drooling over the latest SAS2 PCIe3, I've concluded that I should probably start out a bit cheaper, since I won't have *that* much load after all (just home lab). I'm currently looking at an expander pulled from a SGI rackmounted enclosure "SGI RACKABLE 3U STORAGE DAS SERVER SE3016". This is one of the few expanders I've seen that does not use pcie for power, except the Intel RES* boards, but those are quite expensive. Any problems with the SGI board I should be aware of?

For the ESXi server I then found a decent price on the LSI 8880EM2 RAID card. Comments on that one? Haven't found much in the way of opinion on it, just the specsheet (http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/MegaRAID Common Files/ESG_MR_SAS_8880EM2_PB_110207.pdf).

Should I expect any troubles in connecting those two cards together? Anything else that says I should look elsewhere?
 
cape said:
Hey everyone!
I'm in the slightly anxiety-provoking stage of starting to buy components for a home built SAS disk enclosure. The enclosure as planned will contain a SAS expander, two or three 8*2.5" HP backplanes (depending on expander capacity) and a power supply. This will then connect to my server (ESXi 5.1) via SFF-cabling to some RAID card. And now I'm trying to figure out a good combination.

After much drooling over the latest SAS2 PCIe3, I've concluded that I should probably start out a bit cheaper, since I won't have *that* much load after all (just home lab). I'm currently looking at an expander pulled from a SGI rackmounted enclosure "SGI RACKABLE 3U STORAGE DAS SERVER SE3016". This is one of the few expanders I've seen that does not use pcie for power, except the Intel RES* boards, but those are quite expensive. Any problems with the SGI board I should be aware of?

For the ESXi server I then found a decent price on the LSI 8880EM2 RAID card. Comments on that one? Haven't found much in the way of opinion on it, just the specsheet (http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/MegaRAID Common Files/ESG_MR_SAS_8880EM2_PB_110207.pdf).

Should I expect any troubles in connecting those two cards together? Anything else that says I should look elsewhere?
Click to expand...

You shouldn't have any trouble with that combination. I have an SE3016 which is connected to an LSI 8888-ELP raid card. I have 3 drives in the SE3016 right now and it has no issues detecting the drives.

One thing to keep in mind: The expander card for the SE3016 is 3Gbps only. It does NOT support 6Gbps (It's a bit older design). For a home lab, this is perfectly acceptable. This still gives you plenty of bandwidth for even a 16 drive array. I'm of course assuming you won't be using this for high I/O applications such as a production DB server.

The links that the rather rude poster above me posted are good things to read for info about the SE3016 (and by extension, it's internal expander card).

I have one question for you though: Why build your own? Is this for fun/educational purposes? I ask because the SE3016 itself is dirt cheap for an expander chassis and is actually a pretty decent device. If you're just doing it for fun and as a project, then by all means. have fun!
 
Why not use something like the Supermicro SC846 (or smaller) where the SAS expander is built into the backplane? This will save a lot of cabling - one cable from HBA/RAID card to backplane and you are done.
 
@dalekphalm: Thanks! I'll skip 6 gbps for now, as you say, 3 will be plenty for my home stuff (and leave more money for disks).

As for the "why build it?", it's a large part for fun and learning, partly because I have a bunch of backplanes I want to use for something, and part because this way I can build a small custom box that will fit in the little space I have. My apartment doesn't have room for a rack.
 
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