Moving Hardware to Rack Enclosure?


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I have an elementary question of which I cannot seem to find an answer.

 

I've been running an UnRaid for about 2 years successfully and using the Plex docker.  This server is literally only for Plex.  I'm moving to a new home where I'll be building a server closet and I'd like to move my unraid/plex server hardware into a rack mounted box.  Basically this server was a "test" using an old machine to see if I could actually get it set up and going.  Two years and 3 HDD upgrades later, it's fully functioning and doing great.  I'm running unraid off a USB stick.

 

So, I have two primary questions:

  1. Knowing nothing of rack mount enclosures, do they typically accept ATX motherboards?  In other words, what are the odds that I can literally just take the hardware out of my current gaming enclosure and install them into this rack enclosure and have everything work okay?  If that isn't possible and I need to get a new mobo/processor/RAM combo with the old HDD's, any suggestions?  I'd like to avoid pre-built NAS boxes as it seems they lack the necessary specs for Plex transcoding.
  2. Regardless of whether I need to replace the mobe, etc. to move into a rack mount enclosure, I've been wanting to add a file server to my network.  Would you all suggest that I buy a rack enclosure with enough space for more than the 4 HDD's (3 in RAID, 1 parity) and simply use shares to create a plex server and file server on the same machine?  Or, would you suggest I buy something small to swap the Plex into and then either buy or build a second NAS unit for the file server?

 

I appreciate you humoring my ignorance on these matters.

 

- Chappy

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  1. Rack cases can fit ATX motherboards, so you should be able to move the existing hardware to your new case. You will most likely have to get a 4U case to fit the power supply. You also need to consider the height of the cpu cooler if it's not a stock one. 
  2. Unraid is a Nas and the file server part doesn't use much cpu, so buy a case that have space for lots of disks. Then you don't have to worry about upgrades further down the line. So use the same server for both plex and file sharing. 
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5 minutes ago, saarg said:

Price seems decent, but you might find something cheaper and used off ebay.

 

Great point, I'll be certain to look there.

 

One more question, and this one is a noob question for sure. 

 

Do I/should I somehow separate the Plex files from the file server or, rather, should I consider the entire server as one big file server that happens to have plex files in one of the folders?  If the latter, will I screw up the Plex docker if I move the current folders into a larger overall file structure or can I simply update the paths in the docker?

 

Thanks,

Chappy

Edited by ChappyEight
Added quote.
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What do you mean by file server (LAN shares, cloud shares, etc.)?  You can create shares for whatever you want, and not need to pass those shares to your file server (or just turn on smb shares to share whichever shares you want over your LAN).  My personal setup is I have a share for movies and tv which are passed to plex.  I also run nextcloud as a file server of sorts which allows me to add, share, download, upload etc files to/from my machine (I have a dedicated nextcloud share, but also pass my other shares to it so I can use them).  You can pass whatever shares you want to the file server.  Depending on what file server system you're talking about, I don't see any value in moving all of your media into one big folder.

 

As for a chassis, I have a Norco 4224, purchased from Newegg.  It has 24 hot swappable bays, plenty of room for future expansion.  Quality control and support are basically non-existent with Norco, but my chassis works perfectly.

Edited by statecowboy
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If your looking into getting a 4U, it might be worth it to get a Roswell Case. It will be a little more money but you will get more bays. 

 

For $100 more you can get 20 bays. https://www.amazon.com/NORCO-20-Bays-Server-Chassis-RPC-4220/dp/B00BQY39SO/ref=pd_sbs_147_8?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00BQY39SO&pd_rd_r=07Y94NPR0KKMVCFXA6H5&pd_rd_w=5uPYM&pd_rd_wg=vnWoG&psc=1&refRID=07Y94NPR0KKMVCFXA6H5

 

You can spend a little more then that to get 25 bays.

 

I don't know how much of a rush you are or where you are in the US but I have the 20 bay case above that I will be selling but it might be 1-2 months.

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Sorry for the delayed response, life's been a bit nuts at work.

 

On 3/7/2018 at 1:10 PM, statecowboy said:

What do you mean by file server (LAN shares, cloud shares, etc.)?  You can create shares for whatever you want, and not need to pass those shares to your file server (or just turn on smb shares to share whichever shares you want over your LAN).  My personal setup is I have a share for movies and tv which are passed to plex.  I also run nextcloud as a file server of sorts which allows me to add, share, download, upload etc files to/from my machine (I have a dedicated nextcloud share, but also pass my other shares to it so I can use them).  You can pass whatever shares you want to the file server.  Depending on what file server system you're talking about, I don't see any value in moving all of your media into one big folder.

 

As for a chassis, I have a Norco 4224, purchased from Newegg.  It has 24 hot swappable bays, plenty of room for future expansion.  Quality control and support are basically non-existent with Norco, but my chassis works perfectly.

 

I'm going to swallow my pride here and come clean that when I say "file server" I don't know much more than that. My intent was to mean a consolidated storage point for the home, a portion of which serves as my Plex server.  Here's a second really dumb question: if I were to build a Norco 4224 system, using my existing 4 drives but all new hardware otherwise, how do you get enough SATA ports to connect all 24 drives?

 

 

On 3/7/2018 at 2:54 PM, mgworek said:

If your looking into getting a 4U, it might be worth it to get a Roswell Case. It will be a little more money but you will get more bays. 

 

For $100 more you can get 20 bays. https://www.amazon.com/NORCO-20-Bays-Server-Chassis-RPC-4220/dp/B00BQY39SO/ref=pd_sbs_147_8?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00BQY39SO&pd_rd_r=07Y94NPR0KKMVCFXA6H5&pd_rd_w=5uPYM&pd_rd_wg=vnWoG&psc=1&refRID=07Y94NPR0KKMVCFXA6H5

 

You can spend a little more then that to get 25 bays.

 

I don't know how much of a rush you are or where you are in the US but I have the 20 bay case above that I will be selling but it might be 1-2 months.

 

I'm in no huge rush.  Should be closing on this house in early April and moving by mid-April.  Probably get this network all set up in May if I can get the Cat cabling run by then.

 

Thanks again, folks, really appreciate your time.

 

- Chappy

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There are different ways to get 24 drives connected. 

You could buy a port multiplier/sas expander, but this is slower as you use one sata port for multiple disks. 

There's also hba cards. These are faster as each drive has full bandwidth. The cheaper cards have mostly 8 or 16 ports, so you need two to fill up your drive bays. You could also crossflash a raid card into IT mode (Works the same way as an hba card). You can find lots of cheap good cards on eBay. 

A third option would be to buy a motherboard with a built in raid controller (needs to be able to flash it to IT mode), but I'm not sure if there are motherboards with 24 ports though. 

 

The disk guru @johnnie.black probably have some good recommendations for cards and can explain more correctly about the different options :)

 

With unraid you have what you call a file server that can run both VM's (if your hardware supports it) and docker containers with a lot of applications available. 

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5 hours ago, ChappyEight said:

Sorry for the delayed response, life's been a bit nuts at work.

 

 

I'm going to swallow my pride here and come clean that when I say "file server" I don't know much more than that. My intent was to mean a consolidated storage point for the home, a portion of which serves as my Plex server.  Here's a second really dumb question: if I were to build a Norco 4224 system, using my existing 4 drives but all new hardware otherwise, how do you get enough SATA ports to connect all 24 drives?

 

 

 

I'm in no huge rush.  Should be closing on this house in early April and moving by mid-April.  Probably get this network all set up in May if I can get the Cat cabling run by then.

 

Thanks again, folks, really appreciate your time.

 

- Chappy

No judgement here.....this was my first "server" build so I had to learn all of that as well over the last few months.  With the Norco 4224 chassis you have 6 backplanes.  Each backplane has a SAS connector and a molex power connector (it appears with the norco chassis there are different configurations out in the wild, some with multiple molex connections etc - however, mine has one sas port and one molex port on each backplane).  From that SAS connector you can do one of a couple of things.  One would be to run a reverse breakout cable from the sas connector to multiple SATA ports on your MOBO.  Assuming your mobo doesn't have a ton of spare SATA ports, you are looking at doing what @saarg recommended, which is getting into a SAS controller card and a SAS expander.  This is the route I went.  I have an LSI 9210-8i sas controller flashed to IT mode (basically this gets rid of the raid functionality of the card so your system just sees drives and you decide what to do with them) which is connected (with 2 sas to sas cables) to an HP 24 drive SAS expander card.  From the SAS expander card I run 6 SAS to SAS cables from each of the ports on the expander card to the backplanes.  For what it's worth I bought the sas controller and expander for about $60 for both (used on ebay).

 

As far as "file server", unraid has built in share functionality.  So, you can just set up SMB shares with whatever share folders you decide you want to share over your LAN.  There are also various dockers that give you additional functionality, like nextcloud, which allows you to log in to your server and share files similar to dropbox.

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7 hours ago, ChappyEight said:

Here's a second really dumb question: if I were to build a Norco 4224 system, using my existing 4 drives but all new hardware otherwise, how do you get enough SATA ports to connect all 24 drives?

 

Recommend way is using multiple HBAs to get the necessary number of ports, e.g. one 16 port plus one 8 port or three 8 port, LSI HBAs are recommended, or using a single 8 port HBA connected to a SAS expander, if you want to go with one of these options we can recommend some models.

 

You can also use the available onboard SATA ports together with any of those options.

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20 minutes ago, ChappyEight said:

So, @johnnie.black , is something like this a decent deal?  https://www.ebay.com/i/173103529991?ul_noapp=true

 

Don't know if the price is good or not as I don't know for how much they usually go, it does seem cheap, backplane is the one without an expander, so 24 individual SATA ports, can be messy with all the cables, but the espander backplane model is usually considerably more expensive.

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1 minute ago, ChappyEight said:

ahh, appreciate the clarification and taking the time to respond so quickly.  Quite the learning curve here...

See here for a description of the most common models, the SAS2 expander model is the most wanted, and you want to avoid the SAS1 expander model as it's limited to 2TB disks:

 

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/supermicro-4u-24-bay-chassis-gotchas.11625/

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