talmania Posted January 3, 2017 Share Posted January 3, 2017 My old x3470 and Supermicro X8SIL have been giving me fits and I've decided it's time for an upgrade. Current: Norco 4220 20x drives of various sizes totaling 50TB available with 10TB free. x3470 ~5k passmark Supermicro X8SIL 16gb RAM I currently run a Norco 4220 fully populated with 2 internal SSD's for cache just hanging out internally. Have a lot of room to upgrade the drive sizes (run anywhere from 1.5's to 4tb's for parity) but I'm considering a new chassis that would allow me more than the 20 hot swap bays for preclearing etc. I'm thinking about the Norco 4224 or even a Supermicro SC846 chassis as the foundation for a new build/migration. Doesn't have to be rackmount but I'd like to get at least to 24 bays where I can theoretically max out my unRaid license. Any feedback on the 4224 or supermicro route? Other options I should be considering? Thanks in advance for the advice/opinions! Quote Link to comment
garycase Posted January 3, 2017 Share Posted January 3, 2017 ... I'd like to get at least to 24 bays where I can theoretically max out my unRaid license. Are you running the latest version (6.2.4) ?? You can now have 2 parity drives, 28 data drives, and 24 cache drives !! ... you may need a bigger chassis :) Quote Link to comment
CyberSkulls Posted January 3, 2017 Share Posted January 3, 2017 I would recommend the SM846 way way way over the Norco. Sorry for anyone reading this that has a Norco chassis but they are extremely low quality compared to SM chassis. I have (4) Norco 2212's with garbage backplanes that Norco won't even respond to emails/phone calls anymore and they are still under warranty. So they are in their boxes with plastic on them where they will stay till I scrap all four of them. Save yourself the headache and buy quality SM chassis. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
talmania Posted January 3, 2017 Author Share Posted January 3, 2017 ... I'd like to get at least to 24 bays where I can theoretically max out my unRaid license. Are you running the latest version (6.2.4) ?? You can now have 2 parity drives, 28 data drives, and 24 cache drives !! ... you may need a bigger chassis :) Thanks gary!! I am running the latest 6.2.4 and I see myself upgrading drives to bigger sizes as opposed to just increasing drive count but it would be nice to be able to have a few open spots for preclearing etc. Quote Link to comment
talmania Posted January 3, 2017 Author Share Posted January 3, 2017 I would recommend the SM846 way way way over the Norco. Sorry for anyone reading this that has a Norco chassis but they are extremely low quality compared to SM chassis. I have (4) Norco 2212's with garbage backplanes that Norco won't even respond to emails/phone calls anymore and they are still under warranty. So they are in their boxes with plastic on them where they will stay till I scrap all four of them. Save yourself the headache and buy quality SM chassis. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Thanks for the feedback--how are they on the loudness front? I have my stuff in the garage so its not super important but I don't want to get any louder than I currently am. In looking at the SM846 I see the PS's come in a 900 or 1200w config. Did you replace yours with a consumer model or running stock? Quote Link to comment
CyberSkulls Posted January 3, 2017 Share Posted January 3, 2017 The 900's are loud if your referring to the PWS-902-1R. I replaced mine with their super quiet models: PWS-920P-SQ and the fans never spin up as I don't put anywhere near what is considered a high load on them since I use them for pure storage servers. I removed the rear fans as they are screamers and run my (3) mid plane fans off the motherboard fan controller. So is it louder than my Fractal Define R4 desktop? Yes. But it's not anywhere near what I would consider as "loud". Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
talmania Posted January 3, 2017 Author Share Posted January 3, 2017 The 900's are loud if your referring to the PWS-902-1R. I replaced mine with their super quiet models: PWS-920P-SQ and the fans never spin up as I don't put anywhere near what is considered a high load on them since I use them for pure storage servers. I removed the rear fans as they are screamers and run my (3) mid plane fans off the motherboard fan controller. So is it louder than my Fractal Define R4 desktop? Yes. But it's not anywhere near what I would consider as "loud". Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Thanks for the feedback--I sincerely appreciate it! Did you find your SC846 with the SAS2 backplane already or did you buy a separate backplane to replace the SAS version (of which there seem to be a LOT of on ebay). Quote Link to comment
CyberSkulls Posted January 3, 2017 Share Posted January 3, 2017 I bought mine with SAS1 backplanes since I was only running 2TB Reds. I bought a couple SAS2 backplanes dirt cheap on eBay shortly thereafter. I wasn't planning on changing my drives out and the prices went way up on the SAS2 backplanes so I swapped them back out and sold them. The profit I made on the SAS2 backplanes completely paid for my original chassis so figured why not. I keep all my drives spun down anyway so I wasn't concerned about the power usage of using "more" smaller capacity drives. I had tried to move up to 8TB Reds at one point but the ones I bought (new) were noisy as hell and honestly sounded unbalanced so I stuck with my 2TB Reds as they haven't given me a single issue. If I change drives in the future I'll either go for 10+ TB drives or wait a little bit till the prices come down on SSD's and move to an all SSD set up. I've still got a while on warranty for over half my 2TB drives so I'm in no hurry. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
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