*Official* Norco data storage products thread

Nex7, thank you for a very interesting post! I've been questioning the expander solution for a long time and your answer really makes it a no brainer of what to do :)

To help you to convince your wife. It's 14th February today ;)
 
Nex7 said:
Well then assuming they aren't for reasons unknown throwing in an expander anyway (I can't imagine why they would, it'd be adding expense for no gain), I stand corrected at least in terms of the 4220/4224! Now how do I convince the wife I need a 24-bay disk shelf running full blast 15 feet from her desk, and the budget to fill it with drives..
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To be honest, the stock fans are considerably quieter than my supermicro case...
 
Hi, can you owners of Norco 4224 or 4220 confirm to me the following 2 things:
-temps with stock fans + ambient temp
-temps with lower rpm fansto achieve less noise + ambient temp
Rgds.
 
So, are there any cheap JBOD chassis out there? Nex7, very good information. Thank you. Really appreciate you take the time to make our setups safer! :)
 
Has anyone tried to put the Norco 120mm fan bracket in an original 4020?

I'm curious what level of modification is required. I've had my case for a while now, and have no plans on getting rid of it, but I sure would like to get rid of the 80mm fans.

With it being ~$22 shipped I've considered just picking it up and trying, but I figured I'd check if anyone else has first. From Googling, I could only find info on Cavediver's bracket, and people either cutting the stock bracket, or just zip-tying larger fans to it.
 
MrMike said:
Has anyone tried to put the Norco 120mm fan bracket in an original 4020?

I'm curious what level of modification is required. I've had my case for a while now, and have no plans on getting rid of it, but I sure would like to get rid of the 80mm fans.

With it being ~$22 shipped I've considered just picking it up and trying, but I figured I'd check if anyone else has first. From Googling, I could only find info on Cavediver's bracket, and people either cutting the stock bracket, or just zip-tying larger fans to it.
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according to the site it says it supports the 4020. I was going to get it but i have no gripes with the stock setup. Maybe when i get more drives spinning in there.
 
ALpHaMoNk said:
according to the site it says it supports the 4020. I was going to get it but i have no gripes with the stock setup. Maybe when i get more drives spinning in there.
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Unfortunately it means the new version, with the horizontal backplanes and 4x80mm fans. I purchased mine back in 2008 and have the vertical backplanes with 5x80mm fans.
 
I have a 4020 and the 120mm fan bracket. I'll be putting it in probably by next weekend as I'm rebuilding my WHS. I did a post in the storage showoff thread with dB measurements of the original 80mm bracket with 2 types of fans and I'll do the same when the new bracket goes in.
 
[LYL]Homer;1038404962 said:
I have a 4020 and the 120mm fan bracket. I'll be putting it in probably by next weekend as I'm rebuilding my WHS. I did a post in the storage showoff thread with dB measurements of the original 80mm bracket with 2 types of fans and I'll do the same when the new bracket goes in.
Click to expand...

I remember your post. You have the old Norco 4020 like me, with 5x 80mm SilenX fans. I'll be looking forward to your update.
 
Nex7 said:
...SNIP...
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I'll post this here too, so everyone can see. My other post regarding this: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038448860&postcount=50 [ its in the ZFS and SAS expanders with SATA drives a toxic combo? thread: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1548145 ]


I'll quote the relevant passages here; feel free to check that thread: http://www.nexenta.org/issues/214 [ mpt related driver issues with LSI SAS HBAs and expanders ]

post #4
Updated by Jay Worthington 3 months ago

Richard Elling wrote:

SATA devices directly connected to SAS expanders is toxic.

In case someone cares, Solaris 11, released yesterday, fixes this "hardware"-problem :-D.

Now all we need is for Larry to fork over that promissed sourcecode so it can be fixed here as well ;)

Regards,

Jay
Click to expand...

post #5
Updated by Phillip Steinbachs 3 months ago

Jay Worthington wrote:

Richard Elling wrote:

SATA devices directly connected to SAS expanders is toxic.

In case someone cares, Solaris 11, released yesterday, fixes this "hardware"-problem :-D.

Now all we need is for Larry to fork over that promissed sourcecode so it can be fixed here as well ;)

Thanks Jay for the followup. I'm glad to hear that Oracle devoted resources to resolving the problem and I hope that given enough time, a fix can be incorporated into Illumos and ultimately NexentaStor. It certainly presents a compelling reason in the interim to consider Solaris 11, even if it means giving more chump change to Larry.

-phillip
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Jay Worthington's post #3 in that thread has more info regarding the tests he has done using several different config, also the reason why he came to the conclusion that it was not a hardware issue; aka SAS->SATA tunneling protocol.
 
Just received and assembled my RPC 4220 today.

On my version you can fit 2.5" and 3.5" HDD for OS. The slot for Slim DVD as been changed and is really nice now. The Backplane version seem to be 94V-0 (female SFF-8087).

There is also some switches on the backplane. Seem that there is one for each drive (2 position switch). But I've no idea what's the purpose of those switches ?!
Does anyone have any idea what are those for ... ?

The 120mm option work as intended and the hood use screw to hold. So you need to remove them to open the beast.

Edit: The front panel now come with 2 USB slots and only one slim dvd slot.
 
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ya, I don't like the new dvd slot, those screw posts make it so I cant mount another 2 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor, so I can put 6 drives up top, like I used to.

The switchs turn the led's off, incase you run it at home and hate flashing lights.
 
taroumaru said:
I'll post this here too, so everyone can see. My other post regarding this: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038448860&postcount=50 [ its in the ZFS and SAS expanders with SATA drives a toxic combo? thread: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1548145 ]


I'll quote the relevant passages here; feel free to check that thread: http://www.nexenta.org/issues/214 [ mpt related driver issues with LSI SAS HBAs and expanders ]

post #4


post #5


Jay Worthington's post #3 in that thread has more info regarding the tests he has done using several different config, also the reason why he came to the conclusion that it was not a hardware issue; aka SAS->SATA tunneling protocol.
Click to expand...
I think you should be aware that this information has not been confirmed. It is not confirmed that Solaris 11, solves the problematic SAS expander + SATA disks.

Someone just posted this information, but there are no source. Is this information made up? Is it real? Many have asked for confirmation and links in "is SAS expanders and SATA disks a toxic combo" thread, but no answer. No confirmation.
 
Very informative read. I was about to pull the trigger on the DS-24e (with the built-in SAS expander) before I read this. I liked the idea of the expander not because it provided any performance increase, but because of cheap scalability and simplified cabling.

LSI SAS6160

What I'm looking into now is one of the above units. Would this pose the same problem as the Areca expander in the DS-24e? I'm thinking not since it's a switch as opposed to a device that essentially consolidates.

The reason this is a problem at all is cost. I work for a rather small company and we're trying to keep this as low-budget as possible. We can't afford 48 2TB SAS drives, and we have master copies of everything so all we would lose is a bit of time should a drive fail. At $150/pc. for 2TB Hitachi 7200RPM HDDs, it seems like an attainable goal provided we don't run into any bugs or hiccups (aside from returning the inevitable DOA HDDs). $11k for 80TB (8x Raid 5 volumes) is very tempting.
 
that switch won't do what you want, it ONLY allows expanders and hba to be plugged into it.

You can't directly connect drives to that switch.
 
That switch is for linking a bunch of JBOD's to head units, etc.. Not for linking drives to a controller.

It would not work for you and is not what you are looking for.
 
Well damn. I suppose running 6 SFF-8087 through an unused slot into a 6-port controller could work, it's just a bit messy and limits me to a single unit. We're trying to keep everything "local" on a Mac Pro so that it's easier / faster for assistant editors. That and there's no way in hell they're going to learn to use linux.
 
This is probably going to be a really stupid question, however...

Norco 4224 + Norco ball-bearing rails - racked fine and slides in and out fine. How the heck do you take the chassis back off the rails, though?


I've tried pulling it back out the way it went in but even with what feels like an excessive amount of force it doesn't want to come off the rails... before I get a second person to add some more force is there something I'm missing?
 
On my rails there's little black plastic retainer thingies, you push one up on one side and down on the other. After that you can pull the case out another 3-6 inches and get it to the point that you can remove it.
 
brutalizer said:
I think you should be aware that this information has not been confirmed. It is not confirmed that Solaris 11, solves the problematic SAS expander + SATA disks.

Someone just posted this information, but there are no source. Is this information made up? Is it real? Many have asked for confirmation and links in "is SAS expanders and SATA disks a toxic combo" thread, but no answer. No confirmation.
Click to expand...

The same is true for "SATA over SAS is bugged"; we don't see any details regarding the kind of hardware [& firmware], software & testing methods used, so that this problem can be reproduced & verified by independent testers! At this point its just someone claiming that using SATA with SAS expanders causes data loss.

Have you ever heard of a study carried out by CERN on data corruption? In that study they found that data were corrupted when WD drives with a certain firmware were used with 3Ware cards! They solved that particular problem by updating the WD drives firmware. Now besides drive firmware, theres SATA/SAS controller firmware, SAS expander firmware & lets not forget MB BIOS & the CPU microcode/patch table [updates] it contains!

Also its very simple to verify the claims made by Jay Worthington in Nexenta/issue-214 thread or packetboy's post [#99] in the "ZFS and SAS expanders with SATA drives a toxic combo?"; just rerun all the tests, that show "SATA over SAS is bugged", with Solaris 11.11. If they need more information regarding this, Nexenta can just contact Jay Worthington & ask him directly, as I'm sure he gave an email when signing up for posting privileges there.

This "verification" should be very easy for Nexenta/Nex7 to do; especially since Nex7 claims to have worked for Nexenta, had personally dealt with this issue while there & claims to still have contacts with people there. So if he is personally lacking the required hardware I'm sure he can ask the people at Nexenta to investigate the multiple claims.

Heck even packetboy's post [#99] in "ZFS and SAS expanders with SATA drives a toxic combo?" claims to have seen no data loss from using SATA drives with various SAS expanders & SAS controllers; this too over 1.5 years using 3 different systems, for a combined 4.5 years of usage! I even have the exact same SM chassis as him [well he suggested it when I asked for opinions on SM SC846 almost a year ago; thanks packetboy], although I've only been running for a few months using Solaris 11.11 & not as long as him, no problems so far. I also have this gut feeling, that packetboy is using an OS other than Nexenta! I will be asking him this question in the other thread.

@Nexenta/Nex7

Way to go getting rid of Jay Worthington's claims [& the whole thread]: http://www.nexenta.org/issues/214

Smells like, don't post/say anything contradicting our claim or your post gets removed; well in this case the whole thread!

@everyone else inerested in this matter: UPDATE
scsi/mpt: Disconnected command timeout for Target X
https://www.illumos.org/issues/1942

Added by Thomas Haegi 3 months ago.

i have 3 sun servers running OSOL svn_111b. all of them have a LSI 1068E controller with each one j4200 disk enclosure attached. two of the servers i upgraded to openindiana 151a, on the third server i installed a fresh copy of OI 151a.

the two upgraded servers run fine, whereas the freshly installed server would hang as soon as there's some load on the sas controller. sometimes after just zfs send 1gb of data, sometimes only after 200gb of data i'd see "Disconnected command timeout for Target X" in the message log. the symptoms are the same as reported on http://wesunsolve.net/bugid/id/6900767 . after a while the zpool will be marked as degraded and taken offline - the errors keep being logged tho. when this happens, the only way to recover is a hard reset of the server.

there seem quite a few other people having the same problem with older OSOL/Solaris11 Express setups. but what strikes me as pretty odd is that the two upgraded servers work just fine. there were quite some difference on which drivers were loaded, but even after changing drivers on the newly installed server i would encounter the error.

while none of the other recommended workarounds (like disabling MSI) worked, after installing Solaris 11 (per comment http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dA3SsRssN70J:www.nexenta.org/issues/214) i haven't seen the error even after copying >2tb of data. so it seem confirmed that oracle fixed the problem in the lastest solaris version.

if someone could guide me through what data to gather (and how) to find differences between the defunct fresh installation, the functional upgraded installation and solaris11, i'd be willing to reinstall the server once more. i'd really love getting rid of the solaris11 installation ;-)
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NOTE: quoting in full, just in case this thread gets AXED, just like the Nexenta/issue-214 thread. Also note that Thomas Haegi, in the quoted text above, has referred to http://www.nexenta.org/issues/214 & how he went with the suggested solution there [installing Solaris 11.11] & solved this little problem!
 
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I have the 4020 i believe it is the first gen orignals and I don't mind the smaller five fans at all but i now wish that it had the SFF-8087 connections on the backplanes. I just recieved my intel RES2SV240 and ordered 5 more drives (hitachi 7k3000 2tb) in order to expand and move from raid 5-6 less wire clutter would have been a blessing.
 
taroumaru said:
Way to go getting rid of Jay Worthington's claims [& the whole thread]: http://www.nexenta.org/issues/214

Smells like, don't post/say anything contradicting our claim or your post gets removed; well in this case the whole thread!
Click to expand...

Just adding a note: nexenta.org forums were merged with nexentastor.org forums to consolidate things. This is extremely annoying for me, because it was done in a manner that means google links (when im trying to look up issues/fixes) that are directed at nexenta.org forums no longer work. I do believe all posts have been copied over to nexentastor.org forums but i assume would be a PITA to find. So this has to do with all nexenta.org forums posts, not just the one you referenced.
 
I'm thinking of picking up a 4224 for my server build. I have a few questions:

1. Are the stock fans that are shipping with the 4224 currently still extremely loud?
2. Are there any extra cables or connectors I might need other than the SAS cables?
3. Can the 4224 sit on it's side like a standard tower, or does it have to lay flat?
4. Do you many of you guys NOT have the 4224 living in a rack? I had planned to sit it in a closet or something...
5. What is a good, cheap rack for the 4224?
6. Are there any other concerns or tips I might need to know before diving into my first rack mount server build?

Thanks for any help. I've built a LOT of computers, but never a server. So rack-mount cases, hot swap bays, and SAS are all very new to me.
 
I'm thinking of picking up a 4224 for my server build. I have a few questions:

1. Are the stock fans that are shipping with the 4224 currently still extremely loud?
> Somewhat, but not as loud as 120MM delta fans.

2. Are there any extra cables or connectors I might need other than the SAS cables?
Make sure they are long enough.

3. Can the 4224 sit on it's side like a standard tower, or does it have to lay flat?
I may have seen someone do this but I have it on a shelf.

4. Do you many of you guys NOT have the 4224 living in a rack? I had planned to sit it in a closet or something...
I have mine on a shelf.

5. What is a good, cheap rack for the 4224?
If you find one let me know.

6. Are there any other concerns or tips I might need to know before diving into my first rack mount server build?
Get the 120MM expansion bracket, put the fans on it in advance before putting anything else in the case. Also you may need molex splitters for the fans, the 80MM fan grill has hot-swap fans (if you can call them that) the 120MM bracket is just a piece of steel. Other things to test if you can, test ALL of the drive backplanes, in addtion, you should order 2 spare backplanes, I ordered 2 x 4224 and one unit was fine (ordered from mwave) but the second unit ordered directly from NORCO had 2 bad backplanes, rather, 2 of the ports were bad in each one respectively and it can be a pain to replace them if they are near the bottom, and RMA takes 1-3 weeks, do yourself a favor and order the 120MM fan bracket and 1-2 spare backplanes and that way if one fails or you have one with a bad port you can swap it in the beginning, RMA and then you are not stuck waiting for spare backplanes.

> Thanks for any help. I've built a LOT of computers, but never a server. So rack-mount cases, hot swap bays, and SAS are all very new to me.
One last item, if you have 2 of these in a room you need proper cooling (with 24 hdds each) and dual quad/hexacore otherwise the room will heat up without proper ventilation to 90F+ , with ventilation still 80F+ during the summer..
 
I have a Norco 4020 maybe first get got it some time back....anyways I have only populated the first two horizontal rows and the last two bottom right bays on my case. now that I am expanding I added more drives and find that some of the bays green lights are very dim. same goes for the blue activity led. has anyone else had this problem? if so what did you do to fix it? I should have tested all bays when i purchased
 
I have the same problem. Currently I did nothing, since it doesnt bother me that much. nappit shows me which bays are occupied so I don't rely too much on the LEDs
 
All LEDs don't work right on my Norco 4020. There are two bays where the power LED does not work, but those bay's activity light does work. Also on a couple of the bays in the last column, eg far right, the LEDs don't seem to line up right. Like the LEDs are really dimm when viewed from front, but I see tons of light comming out some air holes in chassis.. its like LED isn't lined up right.

Anyways yea not ideal but I just ignore it. Its why its a $299 case and not $799.
 
OK so i guess i am not the only lucky one to have lighting issues. Drives are all working but it is just nice to have all things uniform.
 
bexamous said:
All LEDs don't work right on my Norco 4020. There are two bays where the power LED does not work, but those bay's activity light does work. Also on a couple of the bays in the last column, eg far right, the LEDs don't seem to line up right. Like the LEDs are really dimm when viewed from front, but I see tons of light comming out some air holes in chassis.. its like LED isn't lined up right.
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Exactly the same with my case...

Matej
 
does anyone have hotswap power issues? ie, add a drive & a few other drives lose power as well for about.. ~4 secs - long enough to drop out, after which they re-appear(?)
 
I would think that would be more likely to be a PSU or controller issue rather than a backplane issue. I haven't noticed anything like that, but it's been months since I swapped any drives.
 
gmutale said:
does anyone have hotswap power issues? ie, add a drive & a few other drives lose power as well for about.. ~4 secs - long enough to drop out, after which they re-appear(?)
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Sounds like your psu is overloaded. Or maybe just that one psu rail if you are using a psu that has multible rails in it.
 
gmutale said:
does anyone have hotswap power issues? ie, add a drive & a few other drives lose power as well for about.. ~4 secs - long enough to drop out, after which they re-appear(?)
Click to expand...

Are the dropouts on the same backplane? I have had a lot of problems in the past with Norco backplanes. Hopefully this isn't the same for you :)
 
According to various reviews lot of people have issues with that. Take a drive out and that section all powers down. That is one of the main reasons I've been holding out on buying one of these cases. I may just end up paying more and getting the Supermicro equivalent.
 
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