Custom JBOD "Motherboard"
- Thread starter TheGuyDanish
- Start date
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I’d love to buy one too if there’s still any available.
Hi,
wow I like this, searching a while for something like this.
Is it still possible to purchase some?
wow I like this, searching a while for something like this.
Is it still possible to purchase some?
Hey man, I do, so feel free to send me a private message on here.
I'll add a disclaimer here for future visitors: At the time of writing, shipping to the US is a bit difficult because tariff charges are (almost seemingly) random when I'm sending with UPS, so I can sell and ship to the US, but I unfortunately can't make any guarantees for what it'll look like when it reaches the US.
Unfortunately I don't do enough business for DHL to want to discuss pricing with me, and the prices they offer me are slightly higher than UPS.
I still have PostNord, which hands over to USPS in the US, but they're even worse in that they demand I pay the import duties upfront, but also don't provide any estimates. They just send the bill from US CBP and an administration fee. :|
I haven't seen the adaptec card before. Does the card handle all IO operations? Does it do pass-through itself, so you can connect the external SAS ports to a computer having an HBA card?
What sort of speeds are you guys seeing? Could I potentially use 12G SAS drives with this?
TheGuyDanish - do you ship from Denmark?
What sort of speeds are you guys seeing? Could I potentially use 12G SAS drives with this?
TheGuyDanish - do you ship from Denmark?
The card is a SAS expander. It works in much the same way as an expander does on a backplane inside a chassis, effectively acting as a switch between the uplink(s, being the HBA in your head end device) and the downlinks (being your drives in the JBOD chassis). There's other cards from different manufacturers, but the Adaptec one is a dime a dozen on ebay.
You can get 12G out of it for sure. I've not thoroughly tested it, since I don't have any 12G SAS devices at home, but in theory, I believe the card can use two links to an HBA for 24G of bandwidth.
And correct, I ship from Denmark to (almost) anywhere in the world. (Major caveat being the US, of course)
It's a bit new to me to see a PCIe card handle both ends of the transfer. I work at Epoka in Denmark, so I only see the bigger enterprise stuff, where we have full IO shelves handling the data transfers, I thought it was a straight-through connection to be honest, but it makes sense that some logic is needed as each SAS port contains 4 links.
The case used looks to be 8x LFF drive, on 2U it seems to waste some space, I have 12 drives per 2U only enterprise JBOD like HPE 3Par 8000 LFF shelves (24 LFF drives total) or HPE D2600 / D2700 shelves.
I think I'd need to try it to fully understand. If both ports in the Adaptec card can see all drives connected on the other end, stuff like TrueNAS probably don't know what to do with redundant paths so it might not be possible to use both, but for the time being I am also just using 1 port per shelf, no redundancy.
How many do you have currently, and do you plan to make more? Just figuring out if I need to pull the trigger now, or if I can wait a bit, still working on getting the server room up and running in the basement.
The case used looks to be 8x LFF drive, on 2U it seems to waste some space, I have 12 drives per 2U only enterprise JBOD like HPE 3Par 8000 LFF shelves (24 LFF drives total) or HPE D2600 / D2700 shelves.
I think I'd need to try it to fully understand. If both ports in the Adaptec card can see all drives connected on the other end, stuff like TrueNAS probably don't know what to do with redundant paths so it might not be possible to use both, but for the time being I am also just using 1 port per shelf, no redundancy.
How many do you have currently, and do you plan to make more? Just figuring out if I need to pull the trigger now, or if I can wait a bit, still working on getting the server room up and running in the basement.
First, hello fellow Dane! And thanks for name dropping, it's always nice to find new refurb vendors.
Second, I'd suggest reading through the 82885T manual, the external ports (labelled I and H) can connect to the controller (HBA/RAID card) or another expander for daisy chaining. All the internal ports (except for the very last one, labelled G, furthest inwards) can as well, but can also directly attach to disks. So this can turn your single (or double) SAS link from the controller into 24 downstream SAS links, with an extra link for daisy chaining. (Note that the molex power connector on the 82885T is not required if it is plugged into a PCI-e slot, hence why I put one no the board)
I know there are some of these expanders that support mulitpathing and different upstream controllers, but the Adaptec docs don't suggest anything, so I'm hesitant to say anything definitive. To the host, the expander shows up the same way an enclosure would in an enterprise SAN (showing something along the lines of 'encl' in ´'lsscsi -g').
I've got about 93 units of the new revision boards (which have fancy features like USB-C, globally unique MAC addresses and better fan control circuitry) so I'm not running out anytime soon, most likely. Especially with orders from the US drying up a bit. (Thanks Donald)
Hello there! Epoka don't deal with private people though, so depending on your situation it might not prove useful at all anyways.
Thank you for the link. It has a lot more information than I am used to having, for enterprise many vendors keep everything really tight. I'll have a look at the full PDF to understand how it works, it looks genius to some extend.
I may drop you a message later. I bought a house not so long ago and just finished routing all the ethernet to a central server room where I have a rack ready, need to build it out first, already got some stuff I want to test, but my 16-bay Qnap didn't survive a 1 year power-off storage, so I'm waiting on a few parts before I can continue there.
Epoka don't deal with private people though, so depending on your situation it might not prove useful at all anyways.Thank you for the link. It has a lot more information than I am used to having, for enterprise many vendors keep everything really tight. I'll have a look at the full PDF to understand how it works, it looks genius to some extend.
I may drop you a message later. I bought a house not so long ago and just finished routing all the ethernet to a central server room where I have a rack ready, need to build it out first, already got some stuff I want to test, but my 16-bay Qnap didn't survive a 1 year power-off storage, so I'm waiting on a few parts before I can continue there.