Yesterday ended with frustration and me wanting to completely throw my Rosewill case out into the street hoping it would get completely crushed by a garbage truck. Just as an aside their rails and chassis are complete garbage. Do yourself a favor and just don't ever bat an eye at them for server components...just...don't...
What do you guys think would be a solid and cost effective chassis or prebuilt server I could look into for my backup server? Main storage chassis is an SC846 so...my thoughts were leaning towards another SuperMicro case in that same series.
The SC826 looks solid. The only drawbacks are that they're kind of pricey compared to the 846 and most have direct attached backplanes. Not a huge issue as I can re-use my 9650SE with SAS to x4 SATA breakout cables. This limits my storage capacity to 12 drives before having to add another chassis or whatever. However my plans are to use the 8TB Seagate Archive drives in 6 mirrors for 48TB of effective back up space. 12 drive bays isn't a huge issue when drive capacity will be high.
Other alternatives were the SC836 which may not be possible to buy as a barebones with SAS2 expander. mrrackables just told me he isn't selling it barebones config right now and most 836 chassis on ebay are overpriced with expander and parts I don't want/need or have the direct attached backplane which would require me to replace my RAID card with a 16 port variant instead of a 12 port one.
And then I could just get another 846 chassis for maximum expandability which would reduce my costs down the road(e.g. wouldn't have to buy another chassis or server as I'd have 48 drive bays across 2 servers.
As far as prebuilts are concerned the Dell C2100 has always been attractive to me but its expandability is limited as it only has 2 PCI slots and only 2 onboard NIC ports +1 for IPMI. The R610 servers are perfect nodes since they have iDRAC + quad GbE with 2 fullsize, full length PCI slots but I don't think anything else out there that's prebuilt that comes close to doing a prebuilt with a SuperMicro chassis in terms of expandability.
Any suggestions?
What do you guys think would be a solid and cost effective chassis or prebuilt server I could look into for my backup server? Main storage chassis is an SC846 so...my thoughts were leaning towards another SuperMicro case in that same series.
The SC826 looks solid. The only drawbacks are that they're kind of pricey compared to the 846 and most have direct attached backplanes. Not a huge issue as I can re-use my 9650SE with SAS to x4 SATA breakout cables. This limits my storage capacity to 12 drives before having to add another chassis or whatever. However my plans are to use the 8TB Seagate Archive drives in 6 mirrors for 48TB of effective back up space. 12 drive bays isn't a huge issue when drive capacity will be high.
Other alternatives were the SC836 which may not be possible to buy as a barebones with SAS2 expander. mrrackables just told me he isn't selling it barebones config right now and most 836 chassis on ebay are overpriced with expander and parts I don't want/need or have the direct attached backplane which would require me to replace my RAID card with a 16 port variant instead of a 12 port one.
And then I could just get another 846 chassis for maximum expandability which would reduce my costs down the road(e.g. wouldn't have to buy another chassis or server as I'd have 48 drive bays across 2 servers.
As far as prebuilts are concerned the Dell C2100 has always been attractive to me but its expandability is limited as it only has 2 PCI slots and only 2 onboard NIC ports +1 for IPMI. The R610 servers are perfect nodes since they have iDRAC + quad GbE with 2 fullsize, full length PCI slots but I don't think anything else out there that's prebuilt that comes close to doing a prebuilt with a SuperMicro chassis in terms of expandability.
Any suggestions?
