Inspired by https://www.servethehome.com/sas-expanders-diy-cheap-low-cost-jbod-enclosures-raid/, my shallow-depth rack (500mm) and the fact that I live in an apartment, I was looking for rackmounted, short-depth cases available in Europe and found a pretty meh market. The best option was Sliger's CX3701 which I could even get sliding rails for. The only downside to that was the fact that mini-ITX is quite restrictive with IO. So I wanted to turn it into a proper JBOD, and I wanted to do it in a slightly fancier way than an empty motherboard and/or a power supply jumper.
So I made a board that could control the JBOD for me instead, kinda like a Supermicro PTJBOD-CB3:
The board has an RP2040 microcontroller that controls the power supply on/off state via an SR latch so the micro can be reset without interrupting the flow of power. A W5500 chip enables remote management via TCP/IP. I've created a small web interface to house all the the functions. An EMC2301 fan controller can drive the fans, and the software actively monitors the on-board DS18B20 temperature probe (or one attached to the J9 header and placed wherever in the case) and adjusts the fan duty according to a configurable fan curve.
The PCI-e slot delivers 12v and 3.3v power to run a SAS expander. I've only tested it with an Adaptec AEC-82885T expander which worked perfectly. I've got an HP 6Gbps expander (I forget the name) that I still need to test with.
The design, including production files, is open source and a permissive license and available on GitHub
Similarly, the software is available under an MIT license, also available on GitHub
More pictures, including it in my CX3701 are here on Imgur.
It is finished for now and I've shipped 12 units to an archival project (Riff.CC) which sponsored my production run of 20 boards. Of course, I have ideas for future revisions:
- A version with a T113-S3 SoC, that way I could run a full Linux system with 128MB RAM on the board and not need the SPI-based Ethernet chip, since the T113 has a built-in GigE MAC.
Hope you folks find it interesting, I have a few boards in stock in case anyone would want one for themselves, but may do another run if there's interest for it.
So I made a board that could control the JBOD for me instead, kinda like a Supermicro PTJBOD-CB3:
The board has an RP2040 microcontroller that controls the power supply on/off state via an SR latch so the micro can be reset without interrupting the flow of power. A W5500 chip enables remote management via TCP/IP. I've created a small web interface to house all the the functions. An EMC2301 fan controller can drive the fans, and the software actively monitors the on-board DS18B20 temperature probe (or one attached to the J9 header and placed wherever in the case) and adjusts the fan duty according to a configurable fan curve.
The PCI-e slot delivers 12v and 3.3v power to run a SAS expander. I've only tested it with an Adaptec AEC-82885T expander which worked perfectly. I've got an HP 6Gbps expander (I forget the name) that I still need to test with.
The design, including production files, is open source and a permissive license and available on GitHub
Similarly, the software is available under an MIT license, also available on GitHub
More pictures, including it in my CX3701 are here on Imgur.
It is finished for now and I've shipped 12 units to an archival project (Riff.CC) which sponsored my production run of 20 boards. Of course, I have ideas for future revisions:
- A version with a T113-S3 SoC, that way I could run a full Linux system with 128MB RAM on the board and not need the SPI-based Ethernet chip, since the T113 has a built-in GigE MAC.
Hope you folks find it interesting, I have a few boards in stock in case anyone would want one for themselves, but may do another run if there's interest for it.
