EU HGST 4U SAS3 12GB/s Storage Enclosure 60 bays £299

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Mirabis

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Mar 18, 2016
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Its dual ported sas, thats why the 2 module.
each module has an uplink and downlink port.
Depending on how they configured the SAS Expander. It might be able to dual link it on one module. Some are hardcoded tho.
My supermicro 847 backplanes dont care which port I use for uplink.
Ill try it when my cables arrive.



Ha, I'm starting out with 26x8TB and will grow from there.
haha nice drives : ) I'll start with 5 or so
 

nephri

Active Member
Sep 23, 2015
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i would like to know if it's be able to do a dual link instead of dual ported...
it's not the same things to have 8 lines for 30 disks instead of 4 lines for 30 disks....
 
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Mirabis

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Mar 18, 2016
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i would like to know if it's be able to do a dual link instead of dual ported...
it's not the same things to have 8 lines for 30 disks instead of 4 lines for 30 disks....
Page 43 of manual:

Enclosure Storage Module (OUT) is used to connect to another bay's Enclosure Storage Module (In) -> so I guess 2 (out) of them are for daisy chaining and the other 2 (in) are for connecting to the Host?

Section 8.6 & 8.7 also seem to confirm this, but it's not written explicitly xD

https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/4U60-Storage-Enclosure-User-Guide.pdf
 

nephri

Active Member
Sep 23, 2015
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That mean this enclosure is for spinning disks.
30 spinning hdds will not saturate 4x12Gb/s links. With SSD it's not the same story...
 

Rahvin9999

Active Member
Jan 14, 2016
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Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Did some quick initial testing.

Power usage:
Idle no disks, fans spun down to low - 72W ( europe so 230/240v)
Idle no disks, fans at max - 235W
( thats with both psu's connected and both expanders linked up)

Idle no disks, both PSU's instaled. but only one powered - 52W
The fans are on a shared powerbus. So you only need power to one PSU to have the fans in the other spin.
If you physically remove either a sas expander module or a PSU the remaining fans go to 100%

Noise:
I would call it quiet.
Makes a tad less noise then my supermicro SC826 and SC847 cases with PWM fans set to quiet mode.
Goes up to blow dryer level if the fans run at full speed.

In/Out ports:
As I expected the Enclosure doesnt care in which port you stick your SAS cable. I can use the In or Out port. It links up and the Enclosure and disks are visible and usable.

SATA disks:
They work, ofcourse you can only see it on one of the expanders (left one viewed from the rear) since SATA disks are single ported.
Ran badblocks against a few disks to generate some load.

Dual Linking:
Seems to work. Borked my lsiutil on the test server. so cant list the output till I figure out why its borked.
The redundancy part works. Can say that much
Have 2 links going from a 9200-8e controller to the enclosure, both on the left expander, So the IN and the OUT port have a link.
Running badblocks on a few drives.
Badblocks keeps running without I/O errors as long as I only unplug one cable at a time ;)
Did that a few times now. Unplug, check, plug back in, unplug the other, check, plug back in, and so on..
If I unplug both cables the server throws up a load of I/O errors, as expected. :p

If anyone wants me to run a particular test post it here and I will see what I can do.
Running it on a linux server ( Ubuntu ) with one LSI 9200-8E controller.
Only have a few disks to test with some sata and some dual ported sas.

That mean this enclosure is for spinning disks.
30 spinning hdds will not saturate 4x12Gb/s links. With SSD it's not the same story...
Its even worse: 60 disks in this enclosure. With Streaming reads and writes you will be able to hit the limits.
Do not think it would be an issue. Its not ment for pure speed.
Nice thing is that the disk trays do have a provision for 2.5" disks so if you want to go all SSD you could. But there are better solutions for that.
 
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unwind-protect

Active Member
Mar 7, 2016
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Boston
Can you clarify how many SAS connectors this has?

If it is a single one, are there adapters from 2x8088 or 4x8088 to 1xQSFP? If so how would thingie figure out which drives are on what lane?
 

Rahvin9999

Active Member
Jan 14, 2016
135
86
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Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Can you clarify how many SAS connectors this has?

If it is a single one, are there adapters from 2x8088 or 4x8088 to 1xQSFP? If so how would thingie figure out which drives are on what lane?
It has 2 expander/controllers in it, which have 2 ports each
You can get a cable SFF-8088 at one end and QSFP on the other.

Because it uses an expander, which is basically a switch. You can attach a lot of devices to one single HBA.
In my case im using a LSI-9207 HBA card wich has 2x4 sas lanes.
So I can direct attach 8 disks using SFF-8087 fan out cables.
Or I can attach up to 1024 disks ( max the controller supports) by using SAS Expanders and Switches

The enclosure uses expanders to make the 60 disks available through, at minimum, a single 4 lane SAS connector. Each disk gets an adddress.

Code:
[   13.093592] mpt2sas_cm0: detecting: handle(0x002a), sas_address(0x5000ccab02000a32), phy(50)
[   13.093594] mpt2sas_cm0: REPORT_LUNS: handle(0x002a), retries(0)
[   13.093625] mpt2sas_cm0: TEST_UNIT_READY: handle(0x002a), lun(0)
[   13.095069] mpt2sas_cm0: detecting: handle(0x002b), sas_address(0x5000ccab02000a33), phy(51)
[   13.095071] mpt2sas_cm0: REPORT_LUNS: handle(0x002b), retries(0)
[   13.095101] mpt2sas_cm0: TEST_UNIT_READY: handle(0x002b), lun(0)
[   13.110301] mpt2sas_cm0: detecting: handle(0x002c), sas_address(0x5000ccab02000a35), phy(53)
[   13.110304] mpt2sas_cm0: REPORT_LUNS: handle(0x002c), retries(0)
[   13.110336] mpt2sas_cm0: TEST_UNIT_READY: handle(0x002c), lun(0)
[   13.111985] mpt2sas_cm0: detecting: handle(0x002d), sas_address(0x5000ccab02000a36), phy(54)
[   13.111988] mpt2sas_cm0: REPORT_LUNS: handle(0x002d), retries(0)
[   13.112022] mpt2sas_cm0: TEST_UNIT_READY: handle(0x002d), lun(0)
[   13.113588] mpt2sas_cm0: detecting: handle(0x002e), sas_address(0x5000ccab02000a37), phy(55)
[   13.113591] mpt2sas_cm0: REPORT_LUNS: handle(0x002e), retries(0)
[   13.113625] mpt2sas_cm0: TEST_UNIT_READY: handle(0x002e), lun(0)
[   13.115121] mpt2sas_cm0: detecting: handle(0x002f), sas_address(0x5000ccab02000a39), phy(57)
[   13.115123] mpt2sas_cm0: REPORT_LUNS: handle(0x002f), retries(0)
[   13.115154] mpt2sas_cm0: TEST_UNIT_READY: handle(0x002f), lun(0)
[   13.116626] mpt2sas_cm0: detecting: handle(0x0030), sas_address(0x5000ccab02000a3a), phy(58)
[   13.116628] mpt2sas_cm0: REPORT_LUNS: handle(0x0030), retries(0)
[   13.116659] mpt2sas_cm0: TEST_UNIT_READY: handle(0x0030), lun(0)
[   13.118417] mpt2sas_cm0: detecting: handle(0x0031), sas_address(0x5000ccab02000a3b), phy(59)
[   13.118419] mpt2sas_cm0: REPORT_LUNS: handle(0x0031), retries(0)
[   13.118449] mpt2sas_cm0: TEST_UNIT_READY: handle(0x0031), lun(0)
[   13.120939] mpt2sas_cm0: detecting: handle(0x0032), sas_address(0x5000ccab02000a7d), phy(68)
[   13.120942] mpt2sas_cm0: REPORT_LUNS: handle(0x0032), retries(0)
[   13.121733] mpt2sas_cm0: TEST_UNIT_READY: handle(0x0032), lun(0)
[   13.133637] mpt2sas_cm0: port enable: SUCCESS

Phy(59) is basically disk 60 (numbering starts at 0 )
Phy(68) is the expander itself
 

sthsep

Member
Mar 7, 2016
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Hm mine runs now also. Just got some problems to get it working. The solution was to take the other controller. Maybe one controller is broken on mine.... Or I did something wrong. It found always the enclosure but no drives. After changing the drives where found. I'm running with a 9300-8E. Funniest thing is that the controller was about 3 times cheaper (Got it cheap from an ebay bidding) then one cable.
 

Mirabis

Member
Mar 18, 2016
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Hm mine runs now also. Just got some problems to get it working. The solution was to take the other controller. Maybe one controller is broken on mine.... Or I did something wrong. It found always the enclosure but no drives. After changing the drives where found. I'm running with a 9300-8E. Funniest thing is that the controller was about 3 times cheaper (Got it cheap from an ebay bidding) then one cable.
hmm that's a bummer.

I've been debating to sell mine xD ... bought a 36 bay shortly after and I don't see myself filling 96 bays with 8TB disks anytime soon hehe...then again, will I ever get a great deal like this again when I need it xD
 

sthsep

Member
Mar 7, 2016
72
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The biggest problem I got now is, that I run out of windows drive letters. :rolleyes: Speeds are great on my SATA drives. Get about 700MB/s peak with 4 seagate 5900 rpm drives when I'm reading files parallel.
 

ecosse

Active Member
Jul 2, 2013
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The biggest problem I got now is, that I run out of windows drive letters. :rolleyes: Speeds are great on my SATA drives. Get about 700MB/s peak with 4 seagate 5900 rpm drives when I'm reading files parallel.
Use mount points?
 

ecosse

Active Member
Jul 2, 2013
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Have read already from that. But I wasn't sure if drivepool work with mount points. Now I tried it and seems to work fine. Thank you you made me to try it ;)
I use drivepool - I have about 150TB on one server driven through drivepool using mount points so all should be good :)
 
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Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Yeah drivepool works great. I used it for a bit with Windows Home Server 2008R2. I liked the interface alot, but I just didnt want to go all in for the software. Must say, they seem well organized, the program is stable, and the software looks beautiful.
I use it in all my storage servers except my (FreeNAS box of course). Main reason is there is no scenario with Drivepool where you lose all your data. Also, Tech support is second to none. They stand behind their products. I have 5 licenses and about to buy another. At 30 bucks, it's a real deal.
 

Mirabis

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Mar 18, 2016
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Ah, that cool Fritz. I debated between making it my main drive software for my data. After I started reading up on zfs, I eventually decided not to use it fully due to the element of no full parity. I must say, the software works great though and risk of loss seems low. I might re install on a small box in Win 10 and play with it again.
Been using it as well, with 2 ssd cache drives + ssd plugin. Only thing missing is a option to specify a cloud drive as backup.... Using second pool with cloud drive & freefilesync as backup method for files...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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I originally looked at Storage Spaces but rejected it because I value my data. I then tried Drive Bender and ran into problems. tech support was all but useless so I dumped it and went to Drivepool. I really like the feature set and the fact that it's rock solid stable. it's also totally forgiving of drive glitches. More than once I had issues of some drives not showing up after a reboot. Drivepool will tell you if drives are missing but as soon as the drives show up, all is well again. There are no BS hoops to jump through like you have with totally inflexible MS crap.

Also, Drivepool doesn't restrict you to same size drives like ZFS does.