Turn SM SC846 4U into expansion chassis?

[5mall5nail5]

Hey all

I have an SC846 that had an Intel S2600CP2J motherboard and E5-2670's in it along with 256GB of RAM. However, the Intel board just gave up the ghost leaving me in a bind because I have eight 4TB sata disks and 8 Intel S3710 400GB SSDs in the box. This was holding my virtualized pfSense firewall. To get back going, I powered up my R620 and am chugging away with that and obviously none of my storage.

So, I thought hey, maybe I can get parts on hand to make the SC846 an "expansion" chassis and use an external HBA/RAID (think H800) from the R620 if need be.

Thoughts on this?

 

[BlueFox]

Supermicro sells chassis like that and converting them is pretty simple. All you need is the JBOD power board (CSE-PTJBOD-CB1 or newer) and a bracket with SAS cables running to the backplane. Gets a little more complicated if you don't have the SAS expander backplane as you'll have to add one in then (be it standalone or swap the backplane).

 

[T_Minus]

Supermicro sells chassis like that and converting them is pretty simple. All you need is the JBOD power board (CSE-PTJBOD-CB1 or newer) and a bracket with SAS cables running to the backplane. Gets a little more complicated if you don't have the SAS expander backplane as you'll have to add one in then (be it standalone or swap the backplane).

You don't need a SAS expander backplane or external/pcie if you have enough channels available... and I wouldn't go expander for SSD myself especially starting at 8 already. In his case that could be 2x HBAs or a -16e for all 4 on 1 card. 1 card or 2 you're going to need cables though.


What "is" your storage setup?