Diskless SAS 8 or 16 drive enclosure suggestions

[Jack Johnson]

I’ve posted a similar topic on the boards, but I’m wondering why you didn’t go with the Areca 8026 expander. Wouldn’t that have eliminated the motherboard you used in your build?

[Petros Kolyvas]

There were two reasons:

1- I was already committed to the headless montherboard/expander route when I tried to use the HP SAS Expander, which didn’t work with the R680.

2- Chasis to fit it in: much easier to find an ATX-ready chassis than a DIY one ready for the Areca.

While having done this once, and enjoyed it tremendously, I’d probably buy a diskless ready-made solution using the very same Areca adapter in the future.

We have found a small benefit to our setup, we want to dual-link to the host adapter, and add more disks and a few additional simple array enclosures, in our case it’s as simple as dropping a second Intel expander in the chassis, linking it up and moving along; but I don’t think this new benefit of the motherboard-style setup outweighs the simplicity, and reliability of all-in-one Area.

All this to say, I think the direction you’re heading is a better one.

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

[Jack Johnson] “- was this a matter of build plug and play or did you have to get into coding/programming something?
– who makes that rack?
– What size battery backup are you using on the rack?”

a) No programming whatsoever. A few questions and some help (from members here) getting the arrays configured properly. Disks are key of course.

b) Do you mean the ISOBox Post the unit is in? It’s made by Sound Construction. https://www.custom-consoles.com/Isobox-post-production.php

c) We use a cheap(ish) RS1500 from APC for each Mac Pro workstation. We test them regularly. The one attached to the large disk array only offers about 10 minutes of runtime but it’s more than enough to initiate the save and auto-shutdown of any projects. I’m noise-crazy and we had originally had a much larger unit but due to poor firmware the fans would spin up, regardless of load, and make a crazy racket.

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger