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.

  • 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.