Seeed reServer Bombastic Storage

Hardware Hub Storage
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I just got my grubby little hands on a Seeed reServer, they’re having great deals on the i3 variant 4c/8t. I do wish the i5 was in stock, would have loved to have the TB4 expandability, but oh well.

As I was watching Wendell’s update on the Mach2 dual-actuator HDDs being available for SATA, I figured that would give me the option to do a 4-disk RAID using to physical disks. This then got me to ask myself if a similar option was available using multiple physical disks instead but with a bigger count of disks (and maybe less power) using M.2 AHCI disks.

Enter, SATA port replication (PR). Reddit gave the impression that SATA PR is unreliable, and we should just stick with SAS PR. Except, SAS HBA’s are humungous, and I don’t need any RAID functionality, just a JBOD-style connection.

Ultimately, I’ve come to a couple of conclusions:

  1. Use a SATA PR approach with something like this:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005446052789.html

Assuming SATA PR is super-usable and stable, this would give me a lot of capacity and redundancy while consuming less power and not requiring any cabling hijinks.

  1. Go for a SATA JBOD approach using something like this:

This is in theory small enough to fit into the case’s dimensions but the positioning kind of worries me. I could get some SATA to to M.2 adapters like this one, which fits my needs almost perfectly:

https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/storage/SDP11/

The cabling will be bonkers lol. If the power connector lines up (which I don’t think it does), I’ll need L cables for SATA. Or I’ll have to rotate the caddy 180 degrees and extend the SATA power cable, which is ok-ish, but the SATA data cables needed are short, and most SlimSAS to SATA cables are longer than I’ll need for this use case. Looming probably needed.

  1. I get a SAS HBA and take a similar route to 2, but I’ll probably need a 3D printed top and a PCIe ribbon cable. I would LOVE to have a SAS HBA also providing eSAS so I could in the future connect up an LTO drive. I could also use 2. for the internal disks and use the approach from 3. to connect an FC HBA instead, since LTO drives support point-to-point FC connections.

  2. Say “To hell with it” and just get Mach2 HDD’s and pretend URE’s aren’t a thing. Since this isn’t mission critical data (home-labbing), I don’t mind too much, but I’d love to have options for more reliability and expandability. 2HDDs with 4 VDEVs is kinda restricting is all.

I don’t want to go the USB route since I love the reServer form factor. Let me know what you guys think?

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Ok, so after a lot of research, I’ve come across a dumb yet enlightening realization: M.2 SATA SSD’s rarely exceed 2TB. The only 4TB M.2 SATA SSD I could find was a Sharkspeed SSD. Yeah nah. The only enterprise SSDs coming in SATA M.2 2280 format are from Micron, but they’re limited to 1TB with the 5400 Pro, with other big players like Kioxia, SK Hynix, and Samsung either not making them in that form factor or making them even smaller.

But lo and behold! As long as you’re persistent, You’ll find some weird amalgamation of solutions! I’m thinking of now merging the Startech SATA adapter with these:

While I go from 8 SSDs to 6 SSDs, I can now go all the way up to 8TB per disk with 2.5" instead; still Micron 5400, to hell with QLC disks, and Samsung’s Evo series maxes out at 4TB. I just need to verify the drive height, and I have to figure out how I’ll connect the adapter given the PCIe slot will be blocked.

Ultimately I don’t want to cannibalize the M.2 NVMe x4 slot, since I was thinking of putting a write cache SSD in it, and a boot drive in the x1 slot, so I’ll have to figure this PCIe placement bit out.

Just for posterity if anybody else gets that itch.

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