I've started building a JBOD out of a Supermicro case for expanding
the available storage on my home network. So I have a few comments
about what I learned so far about using Supermicro as JBODs.
Supermicro has several multi bay chassis as part of their current
product line but I'm looking to do this on a budget so I took the ebay
route. I found some reasonably priced 12 bay cases use "Supermicro 12
bay" as your search criteria. I found a good deal that cost a tad over
two hundred bucks. I was a bit drawn to the Supermicro chassis since
they make a power card that allows the front power button to control
the power supply without a motherboard. It is designed with the
intention of using the cases as JBODs.
CSE-PTJBOD-CB1
The backplane port(s) can be mapped to the outside with something like this:
http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_cables_adapters/
Since my case doesn't have an expander backplane and is instead
comprised of 12 individual SATA ports In my case I'll end up with
three ports exposed since each connector supports 4 drives. If you
have an expander backplane it could be as simple as a single cable.
>From there you'll connect the external SAS ports to a SATA/SAS
adapter. It is possible to get SATA/SAS cards that already have
externally available SFF-8088 ports or if they are all internal you
can expose them externally by using the same SFF-8088 PCI brackets on
the server side.
I intend on hooking this JBOD up to a couple of computers which is why
I am not just putting a motherboard and running it as a full on
server.
On a side not since this is for home usage a few things I plan on
doing to make it better suited is replacing the hotswap 800 watt power
supply with something high efficiency and at least half the watts and
use quieter fans possibly putting them on some kind of speed control
jeff
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2/14/11 7:57 AM, Ross Walker wrote:
>>
>>> I just had this idea of exploring eSATA since most machines already
>>> have an eSATA port. So if I don't get this working, it's not a big
>>> deal. But, I think it could be a cheap alternative to SAS / FC
>>> interconnect.
>>
>> Then take the supermicro chassis without motherboard, get an eSATA to SATA connector, connect it to a port multiplier and then to the 16 drives and see if that works.
>
> Are the Centos drivers for SATA port multiplexers solid these days? Are there
> any differences?
>
> --
> Les Mikesell
> lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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