Supermicro 847 JBOD chassis questions.

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Johnyblaze

Limp Gawd
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Nov 9, 2003
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I am thinking I can go with a Supermicro 847 JBOD for a use in my homelab, non production environment, so I can build my 36x spindle disk array for media storage and also have enough room for 4x SSD's for an iSCSI VM datastore and 2x SSD's for ZIL and 1x SSD for L2ARC and am looking at the following:

847E16-R1K28JBOD
847E26-R1K28JBOD

  1. I have been mainly looking at the E16 chassis, but out of curiosity, can you use SATA drives in the E26 variant chassis backplanes? These are the ones that have the dual expanders with failover capabilities.
  2. Would I be able to just use my 9211-8i in another server along with an internal 8087 cable plugged into the back of this single 8087 to 8088 PCI bracket adapter and this cable to connect the JBOD to my other server?
  3. If so, will one 8088 cable have enough bandwidth to support 36x SATA HDDs and 7x SSDs at their full speed, or do I need something else or multiple 8088 cables as to utilize the full potential of the configuration I've listed above, such as this dual 8088 to 8087 adapter to plug two 8088 cables into the JBOD with the goal being increasing bandwidth?
  4. Does the Supermicro 847 JBOD cases come with all the internal cables needed to connect the 24 and 21 port backplanes to the 4x 8088 connectors on the back of the chassis?
  5. I notice the back of the 847 JBOD has 4 SFF-8088 ports, and I'm just trying to figure out, can I use one connector or do I need more to connect the JBOD to a single host server in the optimal way?
  6. If I'll only need to use one 8088 connector in my application, under what condition would you use more than one 8088 connector?

Thanks for any help!
 
1. You can use SATA drives, but you will not have any failover capabilities. There's no point in spending the extra money if you're not using SAS drives.
2. Yes.
3. Concurrently? Depends. Each multilane cable is good for 2.4gb/s. Do you need more than that? If so, you'd want to use two cables concurrently to double the bandwidth.
4. Yes.
5. If you don't need more than 2.4gb/s in bandwdith, then one will do.
6. If you need more than 2.4gb/s of bandwidth.

Also, if you'd like to buy a used one for considerably less than retail, PM me. I have a spare.
 
Blue Fox said:
1. You can use SATA drives, but you will not have any failover capabilities. There's no point in spending the extra money if you're not using SAS drives.
2. Yes.
3. Concurrently? Depends. Each multilane cable is good for 2.4gb/s. Do you need more than that? If so, you'd want to use two cables concurrently to double the bandwidth.
4. Yes.
5. If you don't need more than 2.4gb/s in bandwdith, then one will do.
6. If you need more than 2.4gb/s of bandwidth.

Also, if you'd like to buy a used one for considerably less than retail, PM me. I have a spare.
Click to expand...

Thanks for all your help! I have one more question. How do the two JBOD backplanes on the 847 connect to the 4x 8088 connectors on the back of the chassis? I'm trying to understand how I can plug one 8088 cable into the JBOD chassis and yet still "see" both backplanes when I only have one 8088 cable plugged into the HBA on my other server.
 
Generally, 2 of the ports are used as input and 2 as output (to connect to further chassis). The 24/21 port backplanes have multiple 8087 connectors, so in order to have 45 drives off a single 8088 input, both backplanes have a cable run between them. So things would go HBA --> cable to 8088 adapter --> cable to back of 847 chassis --> cable to 24 port backplane --> cable to 21 port backlane.

If you're going to run 2 cables, internally you could have either one port run to each backplane or have 2 go to the 24 port one and then have a cable run to the 21 port one from the 24 port backplane. The latter is the optimal setup.
 
Blue Fox said:
Generally, 2 of the ports are used as input and 2 as output (to connect to further chassis). The 24/21 port backplanes have multiple 8087 connectors, so in order to have 45 drives off a single 8088 input, both backplanes have a cable run between them. So things would go HBA --> cable to 8088 adapter --> cable to back of 847 chassis --> cable to 24 port backplane --> cable to 21 port backlane.

If you're going to run 2 cables, internally you could have either one port run to each backplane or have 2 go to the 24 port one and then have a cable run to the 21 port one from the 24 port backplane. The latter is the optimal setup.
Click to expand...

Perfect, exactly the answer I was looking for. Thank you.

Also PM'ed you about your spare 847 JBOD.
 
Or just run two to the front, and two to the back, and nothing inside. No outputs or daisy chain ability, but fastest bandwidth possible.

Normally when people are using these, they aren't looking for bandwidth, but iops, and it takes a crapload of iops to get over the bandwidth of a single disk, without using ssd's.
 
patrickdk said:
Or just run two to the front, and two to the back, and nothing inside. No outputs or daisy chain ability, but fastest bandwidth possible.

Normally when people are using these, they aren't looking for bandwidth, but iops, and it takes a crapload of iops to get over the bandwidth of a single disk, without using ssd's.
Click to expand...

Good info to know, thank you!
 
patrickdk said:
Or just run two to the front, and two to the back, and nothing inside. No outputs or daisy chain ability, but fastest bandwidth possible.

Normally when people are using these, they aren't looking for bandwidth, but iops, and it takes a crapload of iops to get over the bandwidth of a single disk, without using ssd's.
Click to expand...
Yep, only downside is you'd need two HBAs (along with some extra cables).
 
The sff8088 ports in the back of the case, are they hard configured in a special way? Or can I configure them as differently depending on my needs? There are four of the ports, from top to bottom:
1. ???
2. ???
3. sff8088 from the internal 24 port sas to the internal 21 port sas card(?)
4. sff8088 in from the hba card in the server, connected to the internal 24-port sas card(?).

Or?
 
brutalizer said:
The sff8088 ports in the back of the case, are they hard configured in a special way? Or can I configure them as differently depending on my needs? There are four of the ports, from top to bottom:
1. ???
2. ???
3. sff8088 from the internal 24 port sas to the internal 21 port sas card(?)
4. sff8088 in from the hba card in the server, connected to the internal 24-port sas card(?).

Or?
Click to expand...

Seems like you can configure them how you wish, as they have 4x 8087 connectors on the inside, check this newegg link for the picture of the inside of the chassis.

What I am going to do is run two cables to one dual port HBA on another server, as Blue Fox described in his post above.
 
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