Hello everyone,
I was gifted a SC846 chassis with a system ready to go inside. For the chassis itself I was curious if there were a part I could use to replace the DVD drive on the back with SSDs? Through many google searches I found a part, MCP-220-84606-0N, which appears to be just what I am looking for but I can't seem to find it anywhere. I see that this part uses a board part number BPN-SAS-2PT which I can find but obviously but itself it's not as useful. Just curious if anyone has tried to do the same? I have already ordered the metal side mount (part MCP-220-84603-0N) but being able to leverage that little bit of extra space would be nice.
As to which EXACT 846 I have I've googled a lot. It came with two 1200W 80 Plus Gold power supplies and the backplane is a SAS846TQ so I believe that narrows it down to the SC846TQ-R900B or SC846TQ-R1200B? According to my google skills it should be the SC846TQ-R1200B due to the 1200w gold PSUs. Not sure if there is much difference between those exact models regardless.
So my next question is- does anyone know if it's possible for me to get a replacement top panel? I've been trying to search for "846 top panel" and such but have had very little luck. the top panel was dropped some time ago right on the back corner and even with as much skill as I could muster with my pliers I can't really get it back into a shape that allows me to close the top panel. The one time I did manage I got it stuck for some time which was not ideal. Any recommendations or ideas on how I can replace the top panel?
Next I wanted to dive more into the hardware I got. So loaded inside was a X8DTH-i motherboard (there's several variants per the manual but printed on the board itself is just X8DTH-i with two Xeon E5620s. The bios shows 65536MB system memory (Which is.. 65.535GB?). There' should be 8 sticks of 8GB ECC memory which should be 64GB yeah? But TrueNAS shows 62.9GB total so uh haha, I'm a bit confused on what's up with the memory. It appears to all be DDR3 Samsung memory (M393B1K70CHD-CH9). There's still four open slots.
As I mentioned It's using a SAS846TQ Rev3.1backplane which is all wired up to three SAS9211-8i HBAs (flashed into IT mode). So from my understanding there is no concerns with having full bandwidth to all 24 drives I believe (please correct me if I'm wrong here). Is there any recommendations for keeping the HBAs cool? Adding a fans anywhere to help with airflow over them? From what I understand I don't think I can monitor the temperature of the HBAs unless I use something like an external USB thermometer? I believe, also, I was told there may be a concern with using SSDs through these HBAs? I obviously need to do more research on the HBAs unless anyone would like to shed light.
My plan would be to be able to run TrueNAS Scale to present storage to a proxmox as well as be a general dump for data for my local desktops. I'd like to be able to play with some apps in TrueNAS Scale a bit but I'd primarily focus on storage presentation to Proxmox so it can handle the VMs, LXC containers, and whatever else I can do on Proxmox. I assume I can just present NFS share storage to proxmox for this purpose? I know iscsi is an option as well but I am pretty sure from what I've read so far getting good performance would mean setting up your TrueNAS enviorment properly and intentionally for that purpose- I assume it would be easier/simpler to just use file shares for everything? I am very new to both TrueNAS and Proxmox so forgive me if this doesn't make sense or is a bad idea some how. Please correct me if my line of thinking is wrong. Because I am new to Proxmox, TrueNAS, and setting up a home lab in general I may not fully grasp all I may want to do just from lack of experince so that is a consideration as well.
If anyone has recommendations I'd love to hear what people think I might want to change or upgrade based on my use case? Anything I could swap out to be more power efficient and/or more powerful for running TrueNAS? Features or functionality I am missing out on by being on this older hardware that I'm not aware of? I was thinking that perhaps I could keep the LSI cards but go with a newer SuperMicro motherboard with single CPU setup? Another consideration is if I would want to change backplanes at all? I don't think there would be any reason to other than less cables. Or perhaps it's not even worth touching and have the current hardware just focus on filesharing? Eventually I would like to use more features within TrueNAS itself though such as snapshotting and replication and I don't know if there would be any performance issues trying to do that and handle proxmox storage and filesharing?
Appreciate any feedback, thoughts, or pointing me to resources to help me out.
I was gifted a SC846 chassis with a system ready to go inside. For the chassis itself I was curious if there were a part I could use to replace the DVD drive on the back with SSDs? Through many google searches I found a part, MCP-220-84606-0N, which appears to be just what I am looking for but I can't seem to find it anywhere. I see that this part uses a board part number BPN-SAS-2PT which I can find but obviously but itself it's not as useful. Just curious if anyone has tried to do the same? I have already ordered the metal side mount (part MCP-220-84603-0N) but being able to leverage that little bit of extra space would be nice.
As to which EXACT 846 I have I've googled a lot. It came with two 1200W 80 Plus Gold power supplies and the backplane is a SAS846TQ so I believe that narrows it down to the SC846TQ-R900B or SC846TQ-R1200B? According to my google skills it should be the SC846TQ-R1200B due to the 1200w gold PSUs. Not sure if there is much difference between those exact models regardless.
So my next question is- does anyone know if it's possible for me to get a replacement top panel? I've been trying to search for "846 top panel" and such but have had very little luck. the top panel was dropped some time ago right on the back corner and even with as much skill as I could muster with my pliers I can't really get it back into a shape that allows me to close the top panel. The one time I did manage I got it stuck for some time which was not ideal. Any recommendations or ideas on how I can replace the top panel?
Next I wanted to dive more into the hardware I got. So loaded inside was a X8DTH-i motherboard (there's several variants per the manual but printed on the board itself is just X8DTH-i with two Xeon E5620s. The bios shows 65536MB system memory (Which is.. 65.535GB?). There' should be 8 sticks of 8GB ECC memory which should be 64GB yeah? But TrueNAS shows 62.9GB total so uh haha, I'm a bit confused on what's up with the memory. It appears to all be DDR3 Samsung memory (M393B1K70CHD-CH9). There's still four open slots.
As I mentioned It's using a SAS846TQ Rev3.1backplane which is all wired up to three SAS9211-8i HBAs (flashed into IT mode). So from my understanding there is no concerns with having full bandwidth to all 24 drives I believe (please correct me if I'm wrong here). Is there any recommendations for keeping the HBAs cool? Adding a fans anywhere to help with airflow over them? From what I understand I don't think I can monitor the temperature of the HBAs unless I use something like an external USB thermometer? I believe, also, I was told there may be a concern with using SSDs through these HBAs? I obviously need to do more research on the HBAs unless anyone would like to shed light.
My plan would be to be able to run TrueNAS Scale to present storage to a proxmox as well as be a general dump for data for my local desktops. I'd like to be able to play with some apps in TrueNAS Scale a bit but I'd primarily focus on storage presentation to Proxmox so it can handle the VMs, LXC containers, and whatever else I can do on Proxmox. I assume I can just present NFS share storage to proxmox for this purpose? I know iscsi is an option as well but I am pretty sure from what I've read so far getting good performance would mean setting up your TrueNAS enviorment properly and intentionally for that purpose- I assume it would be easier/simpler to just use file shares for everything? I am very new to both TrueNAS and Proxmox so forgive me if this doesn't make sense or is a bad idea some how. Please correct me if my line of thinking is wrong. Because I am new to Proxmox, TrueNAS, and setting up a home lab in general I may not fully grasp all I may want to do just from lack of experince so that is a consideration as well.
If anyone has recommendations I'd love to hear what people think I might want to change or upgrade based on my use case? Anything I could swap out to be more power efficient and/or more powerful for running TrueNAS? Features or functionality I am missing out on by being on this older hardware that I'm not aware of? I was thinking that perhaps I could keep the LSI cards but go with a newer SuperMicro motherboard with single CPU setup? Another consideration is if I would want to change backplanes at all? I don't think there would be any reason to other than less cables. Or perhaps it's not even worth touching and have the current hardware just focus on filesharing? Eventually I would like to use more features within TrueNAS itself though such as snapshotting and replication and I don't know if there would be any performance issues trying to do that and handle proxmox storage and filesharing?
Appreciate any feedback, thoughts, or pointing me to resources to help me out.