Polling for other options/ideas for higher density sas3/sas4 jbod storage shelfs (36-60 drives)

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HardwareJunkie

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Sep 30, 2022
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I have an older zfs array running here using 7 AIC RSC-3EG2 (16 bay front-loading sas2/6gbps) chassis. Using them as just drive chassis, no mb. (just a pass-through card so I can hook them up externally and a pwm fan controller to lower noise). Problem is I only have room for my 24U rack and it's full so really need to get some higher density options.

Looked at some supermicro chassis (45bay and 44 bay 4U versions) but they are not as efficient as I would like, internally they are just two backplanes and an odd number of drives as I like to create my arrays with hardware redundancy (i.e. can loose a chassis or backplane and still work).

Been searching for a while but haven't really found anything really 'good' just the AIC J4060-02-35X (60 drive; across 3 20-drive expanders) or the Promise vtrack J5960 (similar internal structure). Both are SAS3/12Gbps which, would be a minimum with that density to get decent performance.

I am not looking for anything MORE than 60 drives as that's too dense and won't be used in my case with the desire to design with chassis failure in mind as well as i/o performance per shelf. (4x12Gbps SAS is about 80MiB/s per drive which would allow scrubs to stay below 24hours).

However brand-new both are *cough* expensive, and would need 3 of them to maintain redundancy (3 * 3 expander trays so a vdev of 9 drives in raidz3 would allow the ability to operate even if an entire chassis went offline).

I've worked in DC's for decades and have seen the older STK, EMC, SUN, Netapp, etc units however for a 'home' user am leary of them (mainly due to high sku failure rates and lack of easily available spare parts, plus the lack of access to firmware and documentation).

Doing a lot of google searches for general sas jbods is pretty empty (all seem to be mainly 16 drive or less, or really wasteful (server chassis with drive bays which I am looking for just jbod).

Hoping that people here may have some suggestions to help me widen my net. I have some time (still have about 30TiB free, but that's going fast).