Disclaimer: This is not a "why not just buy XYZ chassis that would fit your needs" thread, it's more of a hack/fun experiment and potentially lower power bills
Current setup (125W with drives spun down, 190W drives running):
With recent changes in VMWare situation and general evolution of hardware, I've re-evaluated my needs and want to try a Tiny/Mini/Micro cluster for compute and a node running the NAS. Essentially something like Dell 5070 Extended (<20W all in) with a PCIe SAS controller with 2 external SAS ports plugged into a "DAS chassis" that would hold the drives.
I have 6x8TB SAS drives being added with 2 more 3x5.25-> 5x3.5" drive cages, what I'd like to do is design/build a chassis that would allow me to use all 4 drive cages (20 LFF capacity), provide power and strap in the SAS expander if possible. First thought is just super barebones and stack the cages in a 2x2 cube and wire PSU to them.
Curious if anyone in the community has considered/seen/done something silly like this and share your thoughts?
Current setup (125W with drives spun down, 190W drives running):
- Supermicro X9 C602 with 1x E5-2670 Xeon + 64GB RAM
- ESXi 6.7 hypervisor
- NAS + Plex Linux VM: LSI 2008 SAS2 controller + SAS expander passed through 10x3TB LFF in RAID6, held in 2 3x5.25-> 5x3.5" Supermicro drive cages
- a couple Windows VMs for remote work/testing
With recent changes in VMWare situation and general evolution of hardware, I've re-evaluated my needs and want to try a Tiny/Mini/Micro cluster for compute and a node running the NAS. Essentially something like Dell 5070 Extended (<20W all in) with a PCIe SAS controller with 2 external SAS ports plugged into a "DAS chassis" that would hold the drives.
I have 6x8TB SAS drives being added with 2 more 3x5.25-> 5x3.5" drive cages, what I'd like to do is design/build a chassis that would allow me to use all 4 drive cages (20 LFF capacity), provide power and strap in the SAS expander if possible. First thought is just super barebones and stack the cages in a 2x2 cube and wire PSU to them.
Curious if anyone in the community has considered/seen/done something silly like this and share your thoughts?