External Drive Attachment


IrishFavor

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Not sure if this is the correct place for this question, If not please feel free to direct me to a better place. Currently i have 2 servers 1 is an old Super-micro with 24bays and is currently running my unraid. However the second server is a dell 710 that has much more processing power but only 6 drive bays. I would like to keep my drives in the super-micro and use it as a SAN while utilizing the Dell 710's processing and memory resources. I have not had a chance to test this and have not seen any similar setups or guides.

 

Would creating a 2nd server with another hypervisor adding the drives from the super micro to the drive pool and attaching to the dell via an external JBOD connection allow me to see the drives within the unraid hypervisor and assign disks?

 

Thank you for any assistance in regards to this.

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Depending on the actual connections involved it might be possible to add SAS HBAs with external ports to the Dell server and connect and adapt it into the SuperMicro. thus giving the dell access to 30bays (or less). The real problem is that both servers need to be powered on at the same time.

 

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The real problem is that both servers need to be powered on at the same time.

There are multiple how-to's online showing what is needed to slave the second PSU to the first. It's fairly straightforward, since all that's needed to turn on an ATX supply is grounding the proper wire in the 20/24 pin CPU harness.
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  • 2 weeks later...

Sorry for the delayed response, work has gotten crazy with the holidays moving in. Keeping them on 24/ will not be a problem. I did not even take into account slaving the power supply together. Currently there is no battery backup however that is my next purchase and i was going to run the APC plugins for power management and safe shutdown as far as turning them on i am not sure if there is a way to have them both power back on once power is restored.

 

As for the models they are whatever came standard with the machines they both have redundant power supplys.

For the Supermicro i am not entirely sure on the model of the machine, it appears that the chassis and PSU are probably the same as [ 6048R-E1CR72L ] (https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6048/SSG-6048R-E1CR72L.cfm).

 

As for the Dell 710 the speck sheet can be seen here (http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-r710/pd)

 

 

as for any connections between the server i have not purchased anything, however i am willing to invest the time and money to get this working. Currently they both exist on the same local network using a gigabit connection to either machine.

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You'll need:

Its kinda like this:

https://www.servethehome.com/external-sassata-disk-chassis-wiring-part-1/

https://www.servethehome.com/external-sas-sata-disk-chassis-wiring-part-2/

 

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ken-ji thanks for the response those look to be pretty reasonable.

 

I will order a few after the holidays and give them a test and report back my findings. I did notice that they do not appear to interface with the motherboard at all, is it safe to assume that the system that they are in will be mainly used to house the drives and power them? Thus not being used computationally?

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This is just me - that overall it might be better to retire the old SuperMicro and just stick to the Dell. That said, the SuperMicro can still be used, albeit a lowend(?) and most likely power hungry compute unit - but I'm not seeing what.

What I posted was a way to salvage the SuperMicro as a chassis for external JBOD. It might be possible (and be even better) to transplant the Dell motherboard to the SuperMicro rather than spending on the stuff I listed.

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Yea the dell motherboard is not compatible with the supermicro chassis that i have however down the road i may by a compatible board to replace them both. For the time being i need the super micro chassis as it has enough bays for what i need. Currently im running 36TB with disks arranging from 2TB - 6TB about 16 drives in total. As i upgrade the smaller drives the physical space will be less of a requirement.

 

currently i am running it as a media server, serving to about 28 users approx 4-6 users on at a time pulling full HD files and i have not had any issues thus far. However i want to upgrade for a few reasons, such as power efficiency and having more resources to be able to run virtual machines and a home automation server. If i can find a good deal on a SSI CEB motherboard CPU (at least 10 cores) and RAM then i will upgrade however for the moment i dont have to spend anything other then the connections between the 2 so i feel that this is the best economic choice for me at the moment.

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