External Drive Enclosure Help

[ToddW2]

I recently acquired an ARECA card with plans to expand my storage system, and am wondering what are the best for the money external enclosures for the hard drives ?

Right now my SSDs, and consumer SATA drives fit in my tower-case... but I`m slowly acquiring some 15k RPM SAS drives I'd like to stick in an external case. I have 4 or 5 now, and will probably add 4 or 5 more this year, and then maybe a handful other drives.

The case hopefully can accommodate drives of different physical sizes, as I`m using some older SAS drives, and consumer SATA which are rather large compared to the smaller size now it seems...

I`m thinking capacity of 20-30 drives.

I don't even have a clue what/where to look or what the cost could range or what's different between the enclosures to watch out for, which PSU are best, etc, etc.

Thanks

 

[unhappy_mage]

What's your budget? For what purpose are you using hard drives? Bulk file storage, mail folders, games, databases, and video editing could all have different answers to this question.

Just as a starting point, though, these SGI/rackables units are a barebones solution. Cheap, and all pre-assembled.

 

[ToddW2]

Thanks, it's not a specific purpose setup... it will be used for many things.

It's basically my "home" server.

- MySQL on some drives
-- Probably a couple different arrays for mysql based on the data
(Some data may be 10-20gb new a day so that may go on a diff. array than read-heavy, and then move to another array for archive of mysql, etc.)
- Archive backup on another array
- A couple single SSD pass-through
- General storage for pics/movies/etc


For business / purpose-built I have complete other setups... just trying to put together my home server for as cheap as possible while maintaining the features I want.

I don't want to spend a lot, I'd rather spend that on the drives, and if replacement PSU are cheap I don't mind grabbing 1 spare. If I can use more than 1 HD enclosure I'd like tokeep them the same so I can swap parts, or PSU, etc.

That enclosure looks like a good start, is there generally anything I should "know" when shopping around ?

I have the "largest" ARECA 1882 I believe, 4GB cache, internal and external connectors if this matters.

Thanks

 

[unhappy_mage]

For business / purpose-built I have complete other setups... just trying to put together my home server for as cheap as possible while maintaining the features I want.

This is the way to do it. Keep the critical stuff and the non-critical stuff separate.

That enclosure looks like a good start, is there generally anything I should "know" when shopping around ?

Spend the money on a good power supply up front. A bad one can take out a lot of drives at once.
Buy it nice or buy it twice. I have bought plenty of pieces of hardware over the years, and if I'd bought the setup I have now in the first place, I could have saved a lot of money.
Quiet is important (to me, anyways). If it wasn't, I would buy a Supermicro chassis, like the SC846-E16. It's a nice chassis (no sharp edges, drive sleds work more smoothly than the Norco) with a good (and redundant!) power supply built in, and a nicely integrated SAS expander.

I have the "largest" ARECA 1882 I believe, 4GB cache, internal and external connectors if this matters.

Thanks

The Rackables chassis linked has a SAS expander in it. This may be a good thing to avoid; Nexenta recommends against using SATA disks on SAS expanders. I'm using an HP SAS expander with SATA disks, and have not noticed problems, but my typical load is approximately zero, which makes problems less likely

 

[ToddW2]

Thanks, the sound isn't a concern for me based on where the systems will be placed.