Hello,

 

I've been running for quite some time now with a NOrco (or xcase in the uk) 4u chassis stuffed with drives. Other than the size of the thing that has been working ok.

 

With the recent (relative) explosion in drive density I'm beginning to wonder why I need so many disk slots anymore when I could double my existing capacity in a mini itx case with 8TB drives. This would be much neater and 'home friendly' than the 4U chassis.

 

However. There would still be concern over headroom should the 5/7/8 (whatever mini itx chassis in use) be exhausted.

 

Has anyone chained together these mini-itx cases when expansion is needed? Using a second (or third or n) chassis as just a dumb drive bay with no mboard / cpu in it?

 

Perhaps using SAS cables directly from the master host, or even something cleaner with SAS expanders / external SAS cables?

 

I'm guessing the PSU in the 'slaves' would have to be rigged up to apply power to the disks with no other components present.

 

If anyones done this or similar can you share? It would be an interesting / modular path to go down.

This will work fine exactly as you've described it.

 

The only issue is, as you noted, the power supply ... and there's an inexpensive solution for this -- SuperMicro makes a nifty little board that lets you independently control the power supply in your JBOD chassis:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817995089

 

I'm a bit fan of the PC-Q25B, but there's a new Silverstone case that has 8 hot-swap bays that I'm been thinking about for my next build:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811163255&cm_re=DS380-_-11-163-255-_-Product

 

The DS380 has been used by a couple other folks on this board, and it works VERY well -- but the airflow across the drives is improved a lot if you make a minor modification to it to block the "leakage" from the fans on the sides of the drive cages [easily done with a couple pieces of stiff cardboard].    Two of these would provide 16 hot-swap bays ... which, with modern high-capacity drives, should be enough for some time to come 

 

Thanks - that's really useful.

 

I came across these as well - which in conjunction with the above would give the possibility of neat cabling between physical hosts :

 

http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_cables_adapters/

 

Only concern I have is most mini-itx boards seem to have one pci-e slot which would limit the expandability (as you'd likely want one SAS controller per additional jbod enclosure).

 

I note there are two very interesting mini-itx motherboards floating around :

 

- An asrock avoton SoC. There seems to be little positive feedback on running it in unraid though. Shame as it has good DIMM and SATA provisioning.

 

- Asus p9a avoton board which has integrated mini sas ports. I couldn't find this available to buy anywhere though (uk) nor any feedback on if unraid would support the marvel sas controllers.

 

If nothing else there certainly seems to be a new market emerging for small NAS enclosures and storage rich boards to control them. Which can only bode well for the immediate future!

If you are ok with something a bit bigger, the fractal node 804 is a nice chassis

Interesting - thanks. Will also take a micro-itx board which might open some options. Are there any recomended / good micro-itx boards out there?

 

I'm off to search the forums for builds..!

Any chassis that accepts micro-ATX or ATX boards will also work fine with a min-ITX board.    Some already have the correct stand-off locations available;  others may require you drill a couple holes ... but that's a very simple process.

 

... of course using a larger chassis somewhat defeats the goal of minimizing the size of the server 

 

If ONE chassis provides all the drive capacity you ever anticipate needing, that's perhaps a different story;  but otherwise I'd think a nice 8-drive mini-ITX case is a better choice, as you can later double the drive capacity with another identical case and still have a very nice "footprint" for your server.

 

... of course using a larger chassis somewhat defeats the goal of minimizing the size of the server 

 

If ONE chassis provides all the drive capacity you ever anticipate needing, that's perhaps a different story;  but otherwise I'd think a nice 8-drive mini-ITX case is a better choice, as you can later double the drive capacity with another identical case and still have a very nice "footprint" for your server.

 

This is a fair point - but both cases so far are much smaller and neater than a 4U Norco chassis

 

So it's all relative. The mini=-tx boards also seem to be a bit limited in feature set in general. And the ones that aren't I can't find availability very easily.

 

Still very much a paper exercise this end. A lot of money to spend on just making things a bit tidier - when the same funds could go on more disk / cache ssd / memory for the existing box.

 

SFF unraid / storage is a very interesting space to be looking into though!

Agree.  Micro-ATX cases are indeed still fairly compact, and you can get significantly more expansion capability with a micro-ATX board than a mini-ITX board, which is generally limited to 1 expansion slot (2 on the slightly extended versions that SuperMicro has, but these won't fit in every ITX case).