I wonder if anyone knows anything about OMNISTOR SE3016 I like to use it as extension to unraid. It seems it can be had for around 200 shipped on ebay. So I wonder if it can be integrated with unraid.

Sorry to dredge this topic up from nearly three years ago.  Just wanting to answer the question.

 

Those enclosures work fine with unRAID.  I got one a couple of weeks ago, and another one is showing up tomorrow.

 

I just finished swapping out the two case fans for much quieter ones, drive temperatures are now nicely in the 30C's and you can barely hear the enclosure (power supply has a bit of a whine to it, going to look into that next).

 

I've got two more 4TB drives ready to go in, which will bring it up to 32TB (28TB usable).

 

Parity syncs and checks complete in under 10 hours.

 

All you need is a SAS controller that supports SAS Port Expanders.  Because the enclosure has a SAS Out port, One SFF-8088 host port is enough for all 24+ drives (you'll need two enclosures), if you don't mind slowing down past a dozen or so drives (depending on how fast the drives are).  Otherwise, a two-port controller (or second single-port controller) and a fast enough PCI Express interface will allow all drives to run as fast as they can during parity syncs and checks.

 

This enclosure represents a tremendous value as my total cost comes to under $480 for a 16-bay system, less than $30 per bay.  Using 4TB drives, that only adds ~$7.50 per TB to the total cost per TB.

 

My old unRAID server (64TB) is partially visible in the upper left corner.

I may have incorrectly believed that these enclosures support 4x6Gb/s SAS connections.  After bringing the number of 4TB drives in my main enclosure up to ten, I'm now seeing a bottleneck during parity checks consistent with the SAS connection being only 4x3Gb/s.  Searching online reveals conflicting specs in that regard.

 

It might be that the second SAS connection on the enclosure ("SAS Out") can be used to double the bandwidth to the host; I know it works as well as the SAS In connection because I've tried the SAS Out instead of the SAS In and it worked just as well.  I have a second SAS card on order to try to answer that question.  If not, these enclosures become less useful if fast parity checks are part of the requirement, since a single 4x3Gb/s connection will hit a bottleneck long before all 16 drives are installed.