EU Supermicro 847 36 bay chassis with board, HBAs, NIC, etc - £350

[Mirabis]

So as items come in, I have a few cable questions ;S

Controllers:

• IBM M5210 12Gb/s HBA [2x SFF8643]
  • PCI x8 slot
• Intel RES3TV360 36port 12Gb/s RAID Expander Card [8x SFF8643]
  • Mounted on 3 rubbers + 1 MB screw, power by Molex
• X10DRL-i onboard 6Gb/s [10x Sata]

Backplanes:

• Front: BPN-SAS-846A | 24 drives | 6 SF8087
• Back: BPN-SAS-846A | 12 drives | 3 SF8087

Issue/Question:

1. The backplane manual says it drives 4 drives per SF8087 connection, with numbers - thus it matters where I plug in the SF8087. Currently I run two SF8087 - SF8087 from the backplane to the frontplane, as the front plane doesn't list the connections to be drive specific. Figured if I give the frontplane enough bandwidth, it will share it with the backplane?
2. I connected two SF8087 -> Sata Breakouts to the 2 x 4 internal ports of my motherboard (but that provides 6Gb/s - fine for my slower drives). Should I connect those sata breakouts to the backplane, where it can take specific drives in each slot to ensure i have the slow disks on that lane? or does it figure that out automatically?
3. The M5210 should be connected with 2x SFF8643 to the Intel Expander, which than connects to my back/front planes?
4. Any other advice? I'm a bit PCI limited.. as I have two P3700's on the way & one of the ram slots blocks a lot..
5. So I need 7x SFF-8087 to Mini-SAS (SFF8643) and 2x SFF-8087 to sata breakout and 1x SFF8643 to SFF8643 to connect HBA to Expander and 2x Mini-SAS to QSFP+ to connect to the 4U 60Bay ( 1 to HBA, 1 to expander) [<Most important question]
6. or (without 4U 60bay) ->
   1. 2x SFF8643 HBA -> Expander, and 7x SFF8643 -> 8087 and 2x Sata breakout

Controllers Image:

Spoiler

 

[_alex]

Mine has also arrived, is a brand-new unit
Sorry, haven't had time to do anything with it last week.

On your Questions:
1.) 4 Drivers per Connector, those will share the Bandwidth, whatever you feed in
2.) guess this is described in the manual somewhere, i expect the first 8087 on the backplane to serve slots 0..4, the second 5...7 etc.

For the other questions i guess you`ll figure out what your setup requires, trial and error should work, don't think it`s possible to break smth. with wrong sata-cabling

Are you still interested in trading the trays ?

Alex

 

[_alex]

I was thinking about using the X8-Board 'as-is' but with a ram-upgrade instead of a X9 with Dual 2670.

Now, this thing idles with 217W without any drives after boot, with single CPU only.
This is quite above the idle consumption of the Dual 2670 in my SC826.

Has anyone a measurement with an X9-Board and without all those raid-cards it came with but a single or dual HBA ?

 

[Mirabis]

Mine has also arrived, is a brand-new unit
Sorry, haven't had time to do anything with it last week.

On your Questions:
1.) 4 Drivers per Connector, those will share the Bandwidth, whatever you feed in
2.) guess this is described in the manual somewhere, i expect the first 8087 on the backplane to serve slots 0..4, the second 5...7 etc.

For the other questions i guess you`ll figure out what your setup requires, trial and error should work, don't think it`s possible to break smth. with wrong sata-cabling

Are you still interested in trading the trays ?

Alex

hehe that's the point;p Trying to avoid try and error, my server has been down for 3 weeks already... websites not running, vms not running etc... Ordered a lot of stuff, but some is still shipping - and cables are like 20-30eu each locally ;p

@Trays, most likely yes Any way u can send me a good quality picture of one of the trays? Have to color match a little and the ebay picture quality sucked....

 

[_alex]

my server has been down for 3 weeks already... websites not running, vms not running etc...

Is Backup present ? I might be able to help you out with something ....

Will send pictures of the trays tomorrow....

For the Cabling, yes, these are ridiculous expensive and hard to find here, too.
Just can't help much as i don't use SAS-Expander cards.
Will try to replace the smaller backplane tomorrow with an BPN-SAS2-826 i have a spare and then continue with the HBA`s necessary. Guess / hope i have all the cabling available, too. But as i`ll most likely use a SAS2 HBA, as it will fit the needs for this box, there`s no SFF 8643 involved - what makes things usually worse due to really bad availability of cables.

Alex

 

[Mirabis]

Is Backup present ? I might be able to help you out with something ....

Will send pictures of the trays tomorrow....

For the Cabling, yes, these are ridiculous expensive and hard to find here, too.
Just can't help much as i don't use SAS-Expander cards.
Will try to replace the smaller backplane tomorrow with an BPN-SAS2-826 i have a spare and then continue with the HBA`s necessary. Guess / hope i have all the cabling available, too. But as i`ll most likely use a SAS2 HBA, as it will fit the needs for this box, there`s no SFF 8643 involved - what makes things usually worse due to really bad availability of cables.

Alex

Yeah no problem. If I'm lucky I get the cables tomorrow, listed 2-33 days on site... But the reviews say it takes 3 weeks. Already started restoring some backups to azure cloud. And have local backups, but my server won't pickup the drives atm.....

Had forward breakout Sata cables, and need reverse xD + already sold those 5x SAS cards for €75 each.. So waiting for shipments to arrive


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[_alex]

75 each is nice , eBay?
Wonder what i can get for the 10GBe Adapter and maybe also the board

 

[Mirabis]

75 each is nice , eBay?
Wonder what i can get for the 10GBe Adapter and maybe also the board

Still on the fence about that 10Gbe adapter.... it's nice... but my house is 1Gbe atm... sold my switches... so might as well sell it..

The board... i have not been able to sell it yet... nobody seemed interested on local sell sites. 75 each was on a tweaker market place for Dutch guys.

 

[_alex]

yes, its definitely nice. But i wont need it, currrently have QDR infiniband and will go sfp+ with 10GbE. Crazy that it's cheaper to get 40Gb infiniband than 10GbE equipment

 

[frogtech]

Infiniband switches are obnoxiously loud though. And you can do 10 GBE relatively inexpensively with the lb6m