Best means to mount a large number of drives

TrueNAS General
1

So Iove my TrueNas which I currently use in a P100 Antec with 7 12Tb drives. Works flawless. But I need to expand. I’ve been looking at options like NetApp Disk Shelves, and whether or not they would make it a good SAS target.

I’d be interested in just expanding my Truenas as-is to be able to mount the number of drives I want, but I’m not finding the right case to do it.

I miss the old days where I had a double-wide Chenbro that would handle 20 5.25 bays that you could turn into anything and using the converters mount a ton of drives. (and oh, those casters on the bottom) but long gone. I haven’t really found a better case than the P100 for mounting a large number of drives, but I’m also open to that suggestion.

2

Have you considered the fractal define 7 XL?
I have the smaller One (5 standard) and Is a really good case for a nas

3

The 7XL is precisely what I use, currently holds 8x spinning rust and 4x SSD with room for more. I added 4xhotswap bays for both 3.5 and 2.5 drives.

4

I’ve seen it and thought about; I admit I -hate- glass sides, but I’d consider… it just doesn’t add enough bays over the P101 (sorry I said P100 above). I can mount 8 drives in it; so that’s fine. I really want the ability to mount about 12+ drives. A side by side pedestal would be great but a 4U/6U is an option

5

I’d use a 24 bay 4U

24 bay
24 bay1008×756 142 KB

6

Can the board out of this be changed? I’m currently using a Threadripper Pro 5965WX and my current configuration is:

Asrock Rack WRX80D8-2T
5965WX Pro
Quadro RTX A2000
7 12TB
2 Asus 4-NVME PCI-E adapters (each with 4x4TB NVME)
1 500Gb boot drive (frequent backups here)
LSI 9300 IT Mode HBA for the rust drives
512Gb ECC Nemix RAM

I pass through 96Gb and the LSI PCI card to TrueNas. I keep a TrueNAS ARC on one of the NVME PCI-E cards… My other VMs on the other. But as my VM space grows, I’d like to be able to setup more boot space for them (on NVME I have room) but data space (I need to add more targets)

So I’m either looking at DiskShelf or if I find a case I can expand to. I use this for homelab but also for real-world staging and off-site IT management work that I handle.

I had also looked at potentially adding another threadripper build recently, mostly for the PCI-E lanes, again, as I’m looking for something that can handle the compression needs I’m going to have; if that’s the case I’m just grabbing a Threadripper 7000 series and we’ll see. But for this system if I can find a way in a case or something like it to expand that would be more ideal

7

Take a look at a KTN-STL3. 15 drive shelf, runs about $150 with trays on ebay. I use 3 of them with Truenas hooked to a 9306-16e.

1 Like
8

What kind of card would you recommend to run this?

9

Any LSI external controller. An 8e for 1-2 shelves, 16e for 1-4. The STL3 is 6Gb so whatever sas2 is cheapest on ebay.