Large JBOD chassis without a backplane?

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nicholasfarmer

Limp Gawd
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Apr 19, 2007
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I'm looking for some feedback or suggestions for a rack server or tower sized case that can hold greater than twenty 3.5 hard drives, but, contain no back plane. A simple chunk of sheet metal to hold a wad of drives and let me plug in a bunch of sata/sas + molex connectors to each drive. Proper cooling is a big plus and room for random001 server board would be nice but not required.

I know Norco and SuperMicro make some great server cases. I've spent some time on here and into the googles and found some awesome projects that some great metal smiths have designed. I can never find the simple stuff for sale. The BackBlaze server chassis are awesome but again have micro backplanes.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions?

Nick
 
You're not going to find much, if anything, without a backplane for a reason. Not sure why you have to go without one.
 
I would guess the reasoning is that it's an unnecessary cost. If you don't need hotswap capability, there's not a lot of justification for the cost of the backplane and the associated drive caddies.

But I doubt you'll find much out there with anything over a 20 drive capacity. Multiple towers may be your cheapest route.
 
Use a BackBlaze pod, don't put in the small backplanes, turn the drives over and run power/SATA to them individually.
 
I completely forgot about the Lian-Li case. I remember looking at that back when I expanded out of my eight bay Corsair tower.

I've sent a few emails to BackBlaze and 45Drives and never got anything useful back. Seeing how hard it will be to buy and support the larger rack mount, I might just stick with the Lian-Li case.

Sad to say, the Lian-Li case has way better cooling ability than any of the other rack mounts.

Thank you both for the suggestions.
If anyone else has suggestions please post!

The reason for no back plane is to reduce fault domain. I've read too many blogs about the Norco back plane failing. Plus a lot of cases will under commit the Amps per row of drives causing issues during spin up. The back blaze idea is solid having the weight of the drive keeping it plugged in. Having drives rattle out of their plugs and caddy is just added risk. Bolt it down and snap in some lock sata/molex cables. Maybe even use a zip tie or two...

Side note: (Mounting 15 spinners + 10 SSDs in the 5.25 bays) times three cases will make an insane VSAN setup... Time to warm up the AMEX...


Nick
 
You could probably make your own spacing system to just drop the drives in, similar the backblaze pods except with connectors upright. Basically get a generic/cheap 4U case where the top comes off then build a grid out of wood or other material that you have tools to work with to drop drives in. Keep cooling in mind, you want decent air flow.

May be able to do it with some metal wire type product, something that is strong enough but that you can easily cut to size and tie together like you would with rebar.

Come to think of it, this would be cool for a cheap mass storage system, if you have a cable management arm you'd still be able to hot swap drives.

The expensive part is the drive controller though, still need something that can handle all those drives.
 
nicholasfarmer said:
Plus a lot of cases will under commit the Amps per row of drives causing issues during spin up.
Click to expand...

that's what staggered spinup is for... don't know about the Norco's but we have many many racks full of supermicro servers and I don't think we have ever had a backplane fail
 
I've had one DOA backplane in a Norco and one that failed after a few hours. Other than that they have been working fine.

There are ways to prepare for potential backplane failures, like making sure the number of HDDs in a pool that are connected to one backplane is less than the available redundancy. Supermicro and some other brands also have backplanes of higher quality.
 
I heard lot of DOA issues with Norcos, it's one of the reasons I ended up avoiding them when I built my big file server. I just hate dealing with that and just want something that works out of the box. If you have the patience to deal with DOAs and RMAs the Norcos are best bang for the buck but if you want something that just works out of the box you go Supermicro. They also have redundant PSUs which is a bonus. One cord in the UPS and one in surge or another UPS. So if either power sources fail it does not drop hard, which is VERY bad on a file server/SAN.
 
If this Storage system was for a business that makes money, I would go SuperMicro 100%. I agree that their hardware and redundant power supplies are great.

Since this is mostly for Lab and testing, I just need some sheet metal that can hold drives, damper the vibrations, and provide enough cooling to not kill the drives. The Lian-Li case is perfect for that..

To respond to Flecom: Im using an Adaptec 71605Q with SAS expander so I have enough connectors for lots of drives. The best part about this card is the MaxCache. I can direct connect eight SSDs in raid zero to the adapter to be used a read cache. I can then use the other two SAS connecters to connect to my SAS expander to run all of my spinners. I use super slow Spinning drives that are fronted by eight SSDs worth of cache. Massive speed when I need it and I don't need to worry about the bottle neck of the expander channels. I can enable write cache to the SSDs too but I do not generate enough writes to want to flush out all of my cached reads.

Thanks again for all of the feedback everyone!
Now the hard part... Getting one of these Lian cases ordered from a trusted vender...

Nick
@vmnick0
http://pcli.me
 
Backplanes should not be a failure point to worry about. Norco makes shitty gear plan an simple and this is why you hear of such issues.
 
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