speedcoaster

Oh right, sorry for not updating. No, i didn't find any drive caddys for a reasonable price. I ended up buying a used Supermicro 847E26-RJBOD1 for around 900€. It's like new and works great with Unraid, my HBA and all my drives (Seagate, WD and Toshiba).

Thanks for the advice, I plan to keep the SSDs and the parity drives in the main case and connect them directly to the motherboard. Maybe also some data drives, because in the long run I will max out the number of data drives Unraid supports.

Thanks for the quick reply! I will try it and post the result.

Hey Everyone, I'm planning to upgrade my storage with a cheap SAS Drive Enclosure (the HP QR491A). Working with SAS expansion enclosures is new to me and I want to make sure that I understand everything right before purchasing it: - This enclosure should work fine with normal 3.5" SATA HDDs (like Seagate Ironwolfs) - I can connect the enclosure to my existing HBA with an 2x SFF-8087 -> 2 x SFF-8088 adapter (My HBA is a LSI 9211-8I and uses a LSI SAS2008-> this one exactly https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B01M2AC40Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ) - The disks in the enclosure will show up as individual disks and not as a combined RAID disk I already have about 14 Disks in use (not counting parity or cache drives), but my Fantec case is really poor quality and I have lots of problems with backplane connectivity, so I plan to put nearly all my existing disks in the HP QR491A. Thanks in advance and joyfull holidays everyone

I don't think the backplane itself bent, it's screwed in 5 times per row and near the connectors. I think there are wrong mechanical tolerances, the middle column has a really tight fit, but the outer columns get in a lot easier.

Well, I solved it now. This case is cheaply produced. The drive sleds don't reach far enough into the slot to always contact to the plug. I now bent the front of the sleds slightly outwards to allow a deeper insertion of the sleds. Now all the drives are working in all slots without a problem. Some guy on Amazon had a similar problem and suggested this, so this is a problem of the whole case series. At the end you get what you pay: A cheap case with massiv flaws, but it works with some modifications.

No, just SATA drives

Thanks for the tips. It makes no difference between onboard and SAS. The recognized drives stay the same. I only tried with one cable already (SAS and SATA) and the recognized disks (which were connected over the one cabel) stayed the same.

Hey Everyone! I have a very odd issue with my new drive enclosure from Fantec, the SRC-4240X07. Short background: My Unraid server is running for 2 years without a problem, the components stayed the same over the years. I only added some hard drives from time to time. Everything was in a tower case, but now I ran out of space for new drives. I decided to buy the 19” rack case Fantec SRC-4240X07, because it can store 24 drives and is really cheap (half the price if you compare it to a similar SuperMicro). Now I moved the whole system to the Fantec case and some of my drives aren't recognized (they don't even spin up). I checked if they are recognized in the BIOS and from the SAS controller, so it is not a problem of Unraid or something like that. Only drives in certain slots of the chassis aren't spinning up. I think I already broke it down to a problem with the case or the SAS backplate or something like that. I tested with different SAS cables and I swapped the drives. I tested the whole system, every slot after another with the same HDD to make sure the problem isn’t caused by the power supply, the different drives or something like that. I always used the same SAS port on the controller and the same SAS cable (I reconnected the SAS cable to every row of the backplate for the test). So everything after the backplate stays the same. Please see the result attached, nearly half the slots of the case don't work. Now comes the odd part, I did the same test again with the same hardware and the same procedure. I only swapped the HDD to a SSD. Again, please see the attached screenshot for the result, but now there are 4 more slots which don't work. I tried these new defective slots again with the HDD -> they worked. Again with the SSD -> they don't work. If I'm not missing anything, my problem is dependent on the used slot of the case and the drive? If I put all my 9 drives (2 cache SSDs and 7 HDDs) in "good" slots everything works fine and without a problem. Even after a few restarts, every drive gets recognized. Maybe there could be cold soldering spots, a mating issue betwenn the backplate and the drives or something like that. I'm really out of ideas now, can somebody explain this kind of behaviour? Maybe with a solution? *hoping* I already sent a support request to Fantec, but they haven't replied yet. Thanks to everybody in advance! System components: Fantec SRC-4240X07 SAS Cable: https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B017CO6L8Q/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 SAS-SATA Reverse Breakout Cabel: https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B013G4EQOM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 SAS HBA Card: https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B01M2AC40Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&th=1 HDDs: Seagate IronWolf 8TB Power Supply: Corsair HX850 Mainboard: ASROCK Z87 Extreme9 CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K RAM: 32GB DDR3 Corsair