Supermicro SC847E16-RJBOD1

[Onions]

Iam in the thinking of buying one of supermicroś 45 bay jbod cases. But iam getting stuck on the raid controller. This setup will not be dependent on speed at all. And what i anderstand i need a card with 2x SFF-8088. I can get a really nice deal on a HP P800 card

Question is does this work with the LSI expanders? Since i can get a P800 card for around 150 USD. i dont want to spend around 600USD on a LSI card, And it needs to have raid 6

And iam also thinking of leaving the raiding to the OS using mdadm and just get a HBA from LSI, there quite cheap.

 

[pjkenned]

Do you need a JBOD chassis (which that one is) or a chassis to hold server components too? If you do need to hold other components, there are non-JBOD versions of the 847 with built-in expanders, room for a UP/DP server components, and 36 drives.

Also, a 1400w gold PSU is probably a lot of overkill for a 45 drive JBOD server unless you are using 15K rpm 3.5" drives.

As for RAID controllers, I would personally look to SAS 2/ 6.0gbps as the newer SAS 2 cards tend to have better expander support.

 

[Onions]

Its for housing drives only. Yeah the psu are overkill. Sure a Norco setup with hpś sas expanders is an option. But i would need 2x hp expanders and it would take alot more room. and i cant get ahold of Norco cases here in sweden. And would need motherboards to power the expanders.

So the question is really. does the HP sas cards work with LSI expanders, and how big a difference is it between hardware raid and mdadm software raids, in stability.

 

[packetboy]

Iam in the thinking of buying one of supermicroś 45 bay jbod cases.

I have had two of these in production for about 4 months now, so far I'm pretty happy...very hard to beat the price/density.

I'm confused why you are asking about hardware RAID adapters...once you have storage at these kind of capacities traditional hardware RAID becomes completely unmanageable unless you can live with building a whole bunch of smaller arrays (e.g. 1-2TB each). Otherwise you have ridiculous fsck times, array rebuild times, ridiculously long capacity expansion times, etc...).

I am running ZFS (Solaris 10) which then enables you to use super cheap (non-RAID) HBAs. I'm using LSI-9200-8e which work great and are only $300/each. I'm looking forward to moving up to Solaris 11 Express or Open Indiania to add encryption and dedup capabilities. Also, LSI has their newest HBAs which will give another 40% IO throughput...can't find prices yet, but upgrading my server should be as simple as swaping my HBAs for new ones...try THAT with a hardware raid adapter.

Back to the SuperMicro chassis...my only real disappointment with this case is the LSI SAS expanders used do NOT implement SAS multiplexing...this means if you populate the case with 3Gbps drives (e.g. Sata) your uplinks (SAS connections between the HBA and enclosure) WILL negoitiate to 6Gbps, however, ever other "frame?" will be a "pad" frame so you will only realize 3Gbps of throughput per channel on the uplinks.

This is not a huge deal as you can still achieve 2000MB/s through this chassis...perhaps even more if you use SAS multilink--that is connect TWO SAS wide ports to each of the 2 SAS expanders in this chassis (remember there is a SAS expander for the front drives and a second expander for the rear drives)....I haven't tested this yet, but from what odditory has reported that should give you even more boost.

If you REALLY need this chassis to perform at it's true capability you need to populate it with SAS 6Gbps drives...which will cost you 2x to 3x the cost of using SATA 3Gbps drive.

IMHO not including SAS multiplexing was an extreme oversight as it would make this box amazing deal...without it, it's still great, but not awesome.

 

[Krobar]

Assuming 2TB drives then 16TB 10 drive arrays are manageable with hardware raid (IMHO).

I think the Adaptec 5805, most SAS LSI 6G cards (Be careful about the drive expander limits on some of these) and probably the Areca 1880 will work with that expander chip.