I just got two of these. Fully loaded. Disks, sleds, rails.
Fiber cards + 4 onboard NICs and 4 more on another card.
Its a dual proc board with a bunch of ram slots. (I think its Sandybridge procs, DDR3.)
20 HDD bays. These things are (older) beastly storage boxen.

Board Manufacturer: Supermicro
Chassis Part Number: CSE-846BTS-R920BP
Board Part Num: X9DRi-LN4+/X9DR3-LN4+
Product PartNum: SSG-6047R-E1R24N

I got them because they were at a remote colo, and they crashed a bunch of times.
They cost us more downtime than they were worth.
I happened to be in town and made my boss an offer.
He didn’t have to pay for e-waste fees, and I removed his problem for the low, low cost of $0.

So now they are my problem.
I don’t need 200 TB of redundant storage. I’m gonna shop em out and sell em.
No idea if the dual 920 watt psu will blow my apt breakers. Takes a lot of juice to spin 20 hdds.

So far, I’ve hauled them across half the US, up my stairs, and admired them.
I found a youtuber ‘Art of the Server’ with some helpful vids. Watched a bunch.
No real idea what I’m doing next.

I’ve configured them several times in the past. They always died after months of steady service.
Dead disks, etc. Maybe bad controllers?
A fault that intermittent is hard to diagnose, but they are in front of me now.
I can do whatever I need to. These are complicated devices.
My original plan of teardown and rebuild seems unwise now.

I’m interested in any practical feedback.

  • fulg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    They were running ZFS software raid. So … maybe just use the raid controller instead?

    It is generally a bad idea to do that nowadays, because it ties you forever to that controller. If it dies you will need to find an exact replacement or accept that the whole array is lost. With software raid you can run any hardware.

    Wendell from Level1Techs is a good reference:

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=l55GfAwa8RI

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q_JOtEBFHDs

    BTW: good score, you will have fun with those for sure.

    • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      24 hours ago

      Those were a couple really good vids. I’ve never been a storage specialist, but I do manage all the storage for a small MSP, so I’m not ignorant. Like, I know ZFS pretty darn well, and I apparently collect storage servers for fun.
      That Wendell guy tho, he really knows his shit.
      I don’t know that I got any final answers from him, but it left me with a lot to consider.

      Honestly, a good chunk of what he had to say had me questioning my build with my Highpoint SSD7540 PCIe 4.0 x16 / 8x M.2 Ports NVMe card … on a completely different machine, a build I was quite satisfied with until now. (It’s on my gamer/server, my main box.)

      I put a lot of research and performance testing into the Highpoint build. It’s an 8x card supporting Gen 4 NVMe in an (actually) 16 lane slot. I populated 4 bays. Each stick gets 4 lanes, which is great for Gen 4. (I figured some day in the future when NVMe gen4 is dirt cheap, I’ll fill the rest, and each stick will just get 2 lanes.) After some testing, I decided to use the hardware RAID controller on the card. Considering what old Wendell had to say, I suspect that perhaps it should be software raid instead … still, that would mean relying on Windows to run the raid, and I don’t trust Windows. And then there’s the fact that after reviewing all the spec sheets, I’ve realized there’s a lot I don’t know about the card. But the Highpoint smokes, and I mostly just store video games there. So maybe bit-rot isn’t a big deal anyway.

      All very interesting stuff. Thanks.