Will do - that would be awesome!I am 90% sure I have a spare X8DTH-iF in an SC836 case. No processors or memory. I'll give it a look when I get home just to be sure. If you are still looking shoot me a message.
Will do - that would be awesome!I am 90% sure I have a spare X8DTH-iF in an SC836 case. No processors or memory. I'll give it a look when I get home just to be sure. If you are still looking shoot me a message.
I have a couple questions that I cannot find the answers to about these Dell CT-040 units.Dell Compellent Series 40 San Controller Ct 040 w Trays Dual Power Supplies | eBay and Dell Compellent CT040 San Storage Array RAID Controller E5540 2 53GHz 6GB 16 Bay | eBay Basically all of the things that say Dell or Compellent CT-040 have the same parts. Some might have some extras like SATA or FC cards, but the chasis, motherboard, CPU always seems to stay the same.
It is actually a decent SLC SSD, nothing impressive by today's standards besides the SLC flash.a weird 4GB SSD.
My plan was to start with 1 M1015, then add another as needed.There is plenty of space to put in an SAS adapter, but you will end up needing either an expander backplane(SC836-EL for example), expander daughter card or 2 M1015s to drive all the drives.
Be careful, AFAIK you can't build a highly available file server using local storage, even if you create a storage pool on the local server and try to serve it up as "clustered storage". Clustered storage in Server 2012 high availability features has to literally be something like DAS/FC devices that can be shared with multiple servers.I just bought one on eBay for $275. Chassis, Mobo, CPU, Ram, Power Supplies. I think it is a great deal. It probably shaved $200 off my build.
I plan on using Server 2012R2 to build a SAN using Storage Spaces. I'm pretty stoked.
Thanks for all the great info.
Also be sure to check out Dell PERC H310s, they can be flashed to LSI IT mode and are just as good and are usually a bit cheaper.My plan was to start with 1 M1015, then add another as needed.
This is for my home media collection and Citrix XenDesktop lab. I dont really need it to be highly available, just robust enough so that I dont lose data. Downtime is fine as long as my data is intact.Be careful, AFAIK you can't build a highly available file server using local storage, even if you create a storage pool on the local server and try to serve it up as "clustered storage". Clustered storage in Server 2012 high availability features has to literally be something like DAS/FC devices that can be shared with multiple servers.
Also, storage spaces is still a bit mediocre right now, you might want to check out ScaleIO or Starwind Virtual SAN.
HOWEVER
Storage Spaces Direct coming in Server 2016 is going to be Microsoft's in box converged technology so I can't wait to try that. That's where you can use multiple nodes all with local storage for failover/redundancy.
I received my 4 servers today, pretty surprised with the condition. I'm pleased overall however there are some things that annoy me. Not with the chassis themselves but just the seller. They shipped them with bezels but two of the bezels have tabs broken on the sides making them virtually useless. Also, out of the 4 pairs of rails they included, ONE of them isn't even a matching rail lol, it's a short depth rail and the rest are all standard. Amazing how that happens out of 8 rails.Also the backplane is passive, so it doesn't care what sort of drives you toss at it. If it is a standard SATA or SAS, it should pass the signals. At least the 1.5, 3 and 6 Gbps drives I tried.