iStarUSA 45 Bay Server Chassis

[CyberSkulls]

I've always been interested in the backblaze pods, and more recently the HGST 60 bay deal) just out of curiosity but even just the empty pods are way way overpriced. While searching around on ebay I came across a newegg listing for a chassis I never knew existed. While I know nothing about it, its significantly cheaper than either of the two so called backblaze pod manufacturers @ $495.

 

When the hell did iStarUSA start making 45 bay top load chassis? Anyone ever seen one of these or better yet, have one?

 

While we have seen the HGST 60 bay chassis going extremely cheap lately, replacing one of those power supplies or one of the backplanes might be an issue as far as finding them, not to mention, 220 power, crazy expensive cabling blah blah blah.. So I'm kind of on the fence on that one and like the fact that the iStarUSA chassis uses your standard components we all have laying around, run on normal household power..

 

Anyway, if you guys haven't seen them yet, here is the spam free link to newegg. No hidden affiliate link

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215413

 

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[splnut]

Your link is broken:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215413

 

 

[TaterSalad]

It cracks me up how these types of chassis still have a HDD activity LED. Yes, one of your 45 HDDs is active. 

[djvj]

It cracks me up how these types of chassis still have a HDD activity LED. Yes, one of your 45 HDDs is active. 

 

Lol good point. Should be an array of 45 leds, or just none.

 

That's a damn good price for that enclosure. I have a storinator and probably would have bought that if it was around instead of the backblaze one.

 

 

[CyberSkulls]

I've always been fascinated by these enclosures for some obscure reason. So we just need a massive increase the array device limit and we would be all set

 

 

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[JonathanM]

I've always been fascinated by these enclosures for some obscure reason. So we just need a massive increase the array device limit and we would be all set

 

 

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I think you could use all the devices in 6.2+, granted it would be split about 50/50 between cache and parity protected array slots. I don't think you'd really want to risk only having only 2 parity drives for 43 data drives anyway.

[CyberSkulls]

We can all hope that someday we have the option of running multiple arrays similar to Freenas. As an example, RaidZ2.

 

 

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[John_M]

It looks as though each group of five disks is connected to a port multiplier in the backplane, meaning that nine SATA ports are needed to control the 45 disks. It also says that there's space for a 46th disk!

 

[Lev]

Interesting product, and inexpensive. Wouldn't the performance on a parity check be very slow using those multipliers?

 

If my math is right...

SATAIII 600MB / 5 drives per mulitpler = 120MB/sec max best case

[John_M]

It wouldn't be very slow. It depends on what you find acceptable.

 

FWIW, when I added four extra disks to my HP Microserver Gen 8 via a 6 Gb/s eSATA controller and an external drive case with port multiplier my parity check speed went down from 135 MB/s (average, as reported in the History) to 120 MB/s, which I find very acceptable.