Long time reader here and I was hoping that maybe someone would be able to give me a direction here.
I have a homelab/business server setup in my home office built around 28U glass style short depth (19in Depth) server rack. I currently have two TrueNAS Scale Servers I’ve built and racked in there with a few other testing servers. I kinda backed myself into a corner when I bought it with the short depth.
Anyway, I’m looking for a disk shelf/JBOD solution that I can hookup to my TrueNAS Scale servers, but the depth limitation is not helping. Does anyone know of an available unit that might work? I have about 72TB of data between my personal server and business server. I could always upgrade my drives to larger capacities, but I only have about 2 years on these WD RED drives and would hate to just replace them.
Any help would be appreciated and if this is posted in the wrong location just let me know.
I hate to recommend this because they are ancient at this point, but EMC made some short depth disk shelfs long ago that have flooded ebay:
Keep in mind the SAS expanders sort of rely (if you want to run both) on the interposer to work with SATA drives. This is from memory so it could be wrong but I think there are two different interposers you can end up with, one will let both expanders/controllers see the SATA drives and the other type of interposer only lets one of the expanders/controllers see the SATA drives because it’s missing a multiplexer.
If you had 1 more inch to work with, Inwin makes some fairly short-ish disk shelves that are modern.
That QNAP unit would fit just fine at just under 12in in depth. The only big issue I see right now is that my Personal server is running 5 disk Vdevs and my business server is running 8 disk Vdevs. I wouldn’t be able to just expand the pool with another 5 disks with one unit and new 2 units to expand my business server.
It seems that QNAP’s larger JBODs are closer to 22ins depth, which is a shame because I would love to have more then 8 bays.
QNAP does have some new JBODs that fit into my footprint, but they seem to be locked into QNAP’s walled garden and might only work with their NAS solutions.
Interesting, I always thought that the unit looked smaller then the dimensions that I often got. For $250 it might just be easier to buy one and give it a test. They are older units but that shouldn’t be a deal breaker for my use case. When it comes to the interposers, how hard are they to come by? When I buy older equipment, I tend to buy a few extras for parts just in case something ends up going bad.
For the time being all the different flavors of interposers seem to be fairly easy to come by, costing about ~15USD each, but I suspect supply will slowly go down.
So there are two main interposers, one that will multiplex SATA for you (I am fairly certain it does not work with SAS) , one that is designed for SAS (also fairly certain they will work with SATA but only with the bottom controller), but be warned there are also interposers for the earlier revision of the chassis which is oddly enough named KTN-STL4 that will not work with these. (I took a gamble and bought unlabeled drives with interposers, and got the old ones, still happy but plan to resell the interposers and caddies and keep the drives). Too lazy right now to post the specific interposer model #s (all three mentioned) but will if anyone asks.
Also worth mentioning EMC KTN-STL3 15 bay chassis | ServeTheHome Forums is a good reference, I read through a lot of reddit threads on them since I ended up buying 3 (for under $100 total with no interposers or caddies) but all the info you need should be on the servethehome thread