I have a Threadripper 3960X system that I use for programming / development work on VM’s with bare metal Proxmox and a dedicated TrueNAS SCALE instance for hosting an all-SSD ZFS pool that’s accessible over the network. I have another machine using Ryzen 3700X machine that’s operating as a NAS with TrueNAS SCALE with HDD’s for general storage / backups, and hosts things like Jellyfin and pi-hole.
I’m using the dev server for a lot of different GPU-related programming projects, and essentially have one modern GPU from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. I can’t fit all 3 GPU’s in the dev server while also having an M.2 adapter card to create that all SSD drive pool. To that end, I want to move all the storage related work to just one server, but the current NAS won’t have enough PCIE slots nor lanes to support all the HDD’s, SSD’s, and a 10GbE NIC.
I came across a really good deal on another Threadripper 3960X on ebay and have it in hand. I figure I can move the NAS install to this other TR system and sunset the existing NAS, or reuse it for some distributed computing stuff.
Problem with that is I don’t have any server chassis that can both fit the TR system and accommodate all the drives I have. I do have one chassis that can fit the board, but not any of the drives - leading me to the idea of getting some external rack mountable JBOD / RAID chassis to stuff all my drives in and pass them into the TR storage server over some external adapters.
I’m not able to find any such chassis online, let alone ones that would work for my use case. Any suggestions for what I should be looking for to handle this drive setup?
5x 16TB HDD’s
3x 8TB HDD’s
2x Asus Hyper M.2 adapter cards (4x M.2 to 16x PCIe adapters)
1x MSI Aero card (4x M.2 to 16x PCIe adapter)
tl;dr what are some good external JBOD/RAID rack mount server chassis for hard drives and SSD’s?
As long as you don’t want to put PCIe SSDs in the enclosure there are some decent choices on the enterprise castoff market from EMC and Netapp.
If you want PCIe SSDs in the jbod enclosure you’re likely looking at well into the 5 figure range for just the enclosure; it’d be much cheaper to have all the components in one chassis even if you have to re-buy every single component at that point.
ahh, then you’ve got reasonable choices, here’s one of them:
The reason I was complaining in that post about them being ancient is because of power consumption, but the fact that you’re going to be running threadrippers means it might not actually be a problem for you.
This is a good point, if one can run without needing a separate chassis and the exposed cabling between them, it cuts down on complexity and failure points
The one spare rack chassis I have is actually a Sliger CX4200a that I was hoping to reuse rather than getting a whole new chassis, but I’ll think it some more.
As for making my own JBOD, how would I do that? I haven’t been able to find any modern guides on this
I haven’t done it myself, but I’ve been eyeballing these cases for a while. Going by the specs tab for the CX3701, it suggests:
Case can be used without motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc. as a Direct Attached Storage(DAS) system.
SAS Expansion / DAS Mode requires use of:
One(1) or Two(2) SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 or SFF-8643 to SFF-8644 Bracket Adapters
These SAS Bracket Adapters screw into the case PCIe slots.
External SFF Connector must be matched or adapted to your Host HBA/RAID cards SFF adapter
Each SAS Bracket Adapter requires Two(2) SFF to SATA fan out cables (respective of the SFF type of your adapter)
One SFF-8643 Host to 4x SATA Cable per SFF-8643 port
One SFF-8087 Host to 4x SATA Cable per SFF-8087 port
An equivalent 24pin PSU power-on jumper to power on the SFX PSU for HDD power
Optimal airflow requires an equivalent IO Shield Blank Filler
The page itself also has links to the various items you’d need. They’re probably affiliate links, but
Edit: Otherwise, I guess the tradeoff is basically $400 for the new all in one chassis, or $300 + all the bits to make the DAS. It might end up being more economical to get the bigger chassis. Unless there’s a specific short depth requirement for the rack, anyway.
Yep that pretty much settles it for me, it ends up being about the same cost but uses less rack space for the same function. I already have the internal SAS adapters, so buying external ones plus all the other hardware to make things run externally would actually be more expensive than just getting the CX4712 chassis
I don’t know how dense you want your rack setup to be.
Right now you’re looking at 4U for CPU + 2-4U for JBOD.
It is possible to host all your storage needs in a single 2U chassis, such as one of the Silverstone onesif you exchange your PCIe to m.2 adapter cards with 2U compatible ones, such as these ones.
It may be too much hassle, if you have the rack space, though. Just wanted to point out alternative options.
Case (I am going with a 3d printed one inspired by 32 Bay NAS 20x3.5" & 12x2.5" by slothtechtv - Thingiverse . I am not confident in his design in terms of being good for managing vibrations and easy drive swaps, having caddy support would fix both and fixing that alone means an entire redesign which I will work on)
Ordered that Sliger CX4712 server chassis but it’s yet to ship
I know production can take a bit but they do claim a max of 10 business days until they ship. I’m just an impatient guy, I guess
Emailed Sliger about an expected shipping date just so I could know what to expect, and they got back to me really quick. Turns out they are producing a new chassis called the CX4728 that’s identical to the CX4712 but has another 3 inches of depth, and one way or another they accidentally sent production orders for CX4728’s that were supposed to be orders for CX4712 chassis. The rep said that the CX4712 would take some time to meet the demand because of this, and was very kind to offer a free upgrade to the CX4728 that should arrive sooner than the original order for the CX4712.
