Looking for suggestions on nvme/SAS/SATA rackmount chassis

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toomuchstuff

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Nov 4, 2013
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I currently have an SC846 from the X8 days w/ a TQ backplane. Hasn't really given me troubles w/ the m1015 and no real speed issues. Recently I upgraded boards to an asrock epycd8-2t and swapped out the m1015s with a few sas3008 LSI 9300s. As expected I'm seeing a lot higher throughput, but also some of the backplane appears to be giving me issues. It could be cables, but I swapped them and tried different controllers so I'm at the point where a new chassis sounds like the way to go.

What I'm after is any recommendations on a chassis that will work with the board, preferably with the pmbus and fan controller. Right now the SC846 cycles the fans bad because the board appears to want 6 pin fans.
Also, I figure it is time to move past the DC S3500s and into nvme territory. The board has 2 oculink connectors and all my cards support SAS 12G.

So tl;dr is does anybody know of a 3/4U chassis that supports both SAS3 and nvme drives. Oculink support would be a bonus if those are even in general chassis at this time.
 
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BlueFox

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Oct 26, 2015
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Supermicro doesn't really sell any chassis with NVMe support outside of fully assembled systems unfortunately. If you can live without hot-swap bays, you can mount 4 x 2.5" NVMe drives in an 846 chassis. If you're using SAS hard drives instead of SSDs, there's really no benefit going to SAS3 over SAS2.
 
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toomuchstuff

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Nov 4, 2013
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That's kind of what I was seeing on the SM front as well. Really I'm open to whatever manufacturer, but I'm sure this is another niche case. In the meantime I'll look into a SAS3 expander backplane or some sort of fix for the 846. I'm pretty much running SSDs, but there are some 3.5" drives in there. Support I could just jam the 3.5"s in a JBOD enclosure and go full 2.5.
 
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BlueFox

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toomuchstuff said:
In the end I just decided to keep what I've got. Replaced the backplane with the SAS3 expander model and used a known working controller. Looks like I had both a controller issue and the backplane was toast.

I did find this neat 2U SM chassis SC216BE1C4-R1K23LPB | 2U | Chassis | Products | Super Micro Computer, Inc.. 4xNVME w/ 20 2.5" SAS3 drives. Still thinking about it...
Click to expand...
$1300 though (I've not seen one on eBay). For less you can pick up a whole barebone with better IO if you don't mind used.
 
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