Supermicro 36 bay chassis with dual 1366 board/RAM - $300

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BlueFox

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Oct 26, 2015
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frogtech

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Jan 4, 2016
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it'd be a really good deal if the backplanes werent sas 1 3.0 gbps expanders
 
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cw823

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Jan 14, 2014
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I've wanted one for a while and I'm still on WD RE4 drives. $215 BO accepted.
 
TuxDude

TuxDude

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Sep 17, 2011
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The 3G SAS1 backplanes match up nicely with the 3G SAS1 controller on that board (a LSI SAS1068 chip), and if all you're using in it are SATA2 drives max 2TB (eg. @briandm81 WD RE4s just above) everything should work at its maximum rated speeds. That controller will have issues with drives >2TB though, so future upgrades will have to include at least a new HBA, and probably new backplane(s) with it.

I'd consider one myself, except that it'd end up costing me close to $500 CAD once international shipping + exchange is all factored in, and I can't spare that much right now.
 
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StammesOpfer

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Mar 15, 2016
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I've got the SAS2 rear expander backplane for this if someone needs it. Would give you 12 drives >2tb (with proper controller).
 
sfbayzfs

sfbayzfs

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May 6, 2015
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The rear expander doesn't matter as much as the front one - from everyone I've talked to, the SAS1 expander backplanes only have issues if you have over 20 >2TB drives on a single backplane, so it is more worth it to replace the front backplane than the rear one, plus you can double-cable SAS2, but not SAS1 to the controller. You can run them as-is with a SAS2 controller in a PCIe slot instead of the onboard SAS1 controller for 32 of 36 drives > 2TB, and it's still a good deal as long as you don't mind having 12Gbps shared among 20 drives in front and 12 in back.

I had a few extras of these (SAS1 expander backplanes) and no motherboard, but only 1 person was ever interested in that config, so I bit the bullet and dropped about $300 each to upgrade the backplanes and then they disappeared (mostly anyway, I'm down to 1 available, and I should have a second when I get around to moving the drives into my 45-bay JBOD)

BTW, if anyone is interested in a bunch of SAS1 expander backplanes from these (front and rear, I think I have 5 rear and possibly as many as 7 front) PM me!
 
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canta

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sfbayzfs said:
The rear expander doesn't matter as much as the front one - from everyone I've talked to, the SAS1 expander backplanes only have issues if you have over 20 >2TB drives on a single backplane, so it is more worth it to replace the front backplane than the rear one, plus you can double-cable SAS2, but not SAS1 to the controller. You can run them as-is with a SAS2 controller in a PCIe slot instead of the onboard SAS1 controller for 32 of 36 drives > 2TB, and it's still a good deal as long as you don't mind having 12Gbps shared among 20 drives in front and 12 in back.

I had a few extras of these (SAS1 expander backplanes) and no motherboard, but only 1 person was ever interested in that config, so I bit the bullet and dropped about $300 each to upgrade the backplanes and then they disappeared (mostly anyway, I'm down to 1 available, and I should have a second when I get around to moving the drives into my 45-bay JBOD)

BTW, if anyone is interested in a bunch of SAS1 expander backplanes from these (front and rear, I think I have 5 rear and possibly as many as 7 front) PM me!
Click to expand...
I had nigntmare issues with SAS1 expander. the worst case was random disappearance of HDs when linux/centos 6.X that did panicking raidz2 on ZoL,
other annoying issue was not all drives were detected during booting that cripple ZFS again :p....
the configuration was 12-5 HD of 2TB from various models (seagate/Real Samsung/WD)..
Some minor when 3T and 4T in sas 1 expander where some drives never showup. the only to fix was rebooting :p.

When I moved to SAS2 expander, all my miseries were gone away.

just my experience with SAS1.
 
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sfbayzfs

sfbayzfs

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May 6, 2015
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Thanks for posting your bad experience with the SAS1 expander backplanes, I hadn't seen much about them other than a couple of people saying it worked fine via a SAS2 HBA for zfs, and others saying they had problems like what you are describing for hardware RAID controllers. It sounds like the best advice is to just upgrade to SAS2 expanders or direct backplanes after all to avoid unnecessary risk. I do know there are some firmware updates for the backplanes, and I have them somewhere, but haven't gotten around to trying to flash them yet.
 
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briandm81

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Aug 31, 2014
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Is there a guide to converting one of these to an external JBOD? The SAS part is easy but how do you get it to power up with the server it will be connected to?
 
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