First: I apologize for the long and poorly written post. I used two days on it, so my mind might have wandered a bit.
tldr-ish:
1. Max drivesize is determined by the backplane, is that correct?
If so - SAS2 doesn't support larger than 8TB? (example listing)
2. Am I limiting myself to much buying hardware supporting max 8TB now?
3. Choosing a 36 bay supermicro - means I just have 2u for cards.
Am I limiting myself for future upgrades too much by choosing this?
4. Is the Norco 4224 really as bad as it seems?
I have a rack with a norco 4020 full with hitachi 2tb/4tb drives running a debian fileserver in my home.
Nothing fancy - just sharing media and as a central general storage. Single drives using samba.
My old drives are dying one after another (they're 10+ years or so), so about time to upgrade some stuff.
Read the guides here about making a sas expander box using a norco case, and decided to go for the 4224.
So far I have ordered 4 x hp sas expanders and 4 x ibm m1015 cards, and was thinking of running zfs and mirroring.
Then I found there were alot of bad experiences with the norco cases, so I'm leaning towards supermicro or chenbro instead. And that came with more required reading. It's probably 20 years since I worked with enterprise servers so there's a lot of new information to gather, but luckily this site is great for just that.
I've spent the last 6 months reading up on sas expanders and servers, and have now come to a point where I start to lose information as more gets stacked on top. The post about backplanes was really helpful when reading ebay listings.
Drivesize: I had thought about using 8TB drives, but I can see that it might not be enough when mirroring.
So I guess I need a server/expander supporting 12TB or more so to not lag to much behind, or do I?
Going for Norco/Chenbro is the easiest route as I don't have a lot of reading to do regarding hardware, but are my drives safe with this solution?
The cost of a used supermicro is not that far from Norco/Chenbro, and I have to admit I get a tingly feeling inside me when I browse supermicro listings.. (or it might be caused by a reflection I caught of myself in the monitor)..
I know that this hunger can be expensive to feed, and I really don't enjoy spending money on myself.
Going for the supermicro solution would be nice, but I'm no snob about storage - I just need it to be reliable for now. A plus for a used supermicro is that I can get it all in one swoop instead of hunting around for parts to get it installed.
Planning on buying a 1u/2u virtualization server after this purchase if I manage to find one quick, and the fileserver could perhaps be run from here too.
current guests:
* mail
* misc testing machines
* misc developing envirnoments
* wiki (gets hard to keep track of it all)
* github
* web
All for internal use.
At this point I feel like I'm just making things harder than they need to be, so I would really appreciate any answers or pointers to steer me in the right direction.
tldr-ish:
1. Max drivesize is determined by the backplane, is that correct?
If so - SAS2 doesn't support larger than 8TB? (example listing)
2. Am I limiting myself to much buying hardware supporting max 8TB now?
3. Choosing a 36 bay supermicro - means I just have 2u for cards.
Am I limiting myself for future upgrades too much by choosing this?
4. Is the Norco 4224 really as bad as it seems?
I have a rack with a norco 4020 full with hitachi 2tb/4tb drives running a debian fileserver in my home.
Nothing fancy - just sharing media and as a central general storage. Single drives using samba.
My old drives are dying one after another (they're 10+ years or so), so about time to upgrade some stuff.
Read the guides here about making a sas expander box using a norco case, and decided to go for the 4224.
So far I have ordered 4 x hp sas expanders and 4 x ibm m1015 cards, and was thinking of running zfs and mirroring.
Then I found there were alot of bad experiences with the norco cases, so I'm leaning towards supermicro or chenbro instead. And that came with more required reading. It's probably 20 years since I worked with enterprise servers so there's a lot of new information to gather, but luckily this site is great for just that.
I've spent the last 6 months reading up on sas expanders and servers, and have now come to a point where I start to lose information as more gets stacked on top. The post about backplanes was really helpful when reading ebay listings.
Drivesize: I had thought about using 8TB drives, but I can see that it might not be enough when mirroring.
So I guess I need a server/expander supporting 12TB or more so to not lag to much behind, or do I?
Going for Norco/Chenbro is the easiest route as I don't have a lot of reading to do regarding hardware, but are my drives safe with this solution?
The cost of a used supermicro is not that far from Norco/Chenbro, and I have to admit I get a tingly feeling inside me when I browse supermicro listings.. (or it might be caused by a reflection I caught of myself in the monitor)..
I know that this hunger can be expensive to feed, and I really don't enjoy spending money on myself.
Going for the supermicro solution would be nice, but I'm no snob about storage - I just need it to be reliable for now. A plus for a used supermicro is that I can get it all in one swoop instead of hunting around for parts to get it installed.
Planning on buying a 1u/2u virtualization server after this purchase if I manage to find one quick, and the fileserver could perhaps be run from here too.
current guests:
* misc testing machines
* misc developing envirnoments
* wiki (gets hard to keep track of it all)
* github
* web
All for internal use.
At this point I feel like I'm just making things harder than they need to be, so I would really appreciate any answers or pointers to steer me in the right direction.
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