Puzzle - I Need more Drive bays

TrueNAS General
1

My server has 1 drive bay left. I need to add more disks. but I can’t afford a new server.
My current server has 5x14 TB drives in 1 pool, and 7x 8tb drives in another pool.
The truenas “feeds” a media server that can have another card added to it, a 10GB Lan card for example. The Trunas server has no card slots free, it does have a dual fibre card, with shares for each of the 2 pools going through a separate card to the media server, that also has a dual fibre card. In effect each pool has it’s own 10gb link.
I want to add a 8tb and a 14 tb disk to the truenas. the trunas server is a Dell T340 with 64GB ram.it has several USB 3.0 ports, 2 are in use, but I could reduce it to 1. Here’s the spec for it https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-uk/poweredge-t340/pet340_ts_pub/ports-and-connectors-specifications?guid=guid-5edc3785-4578-4552-9522-0a01f870728c&lang=en-us

I figured if I put a single external Sata on each of the USB 3 ports, the 6gb for SATA would be constrained by the 5GB of USB 3.0

Can anyone recommend a way I can add a couple of drives, without loading the PSU or slowing down the pool? I want to add the appropriate drive to each pool

Thanks

2

Not by adding USB drives to a pool - thats highly not reccomended and asking for you to wake up to no data

If you want to add extra drives to pools then your only recomended way is to:

  1. Add an External LSI HBA - 9300-8e or 9200-8e or similar
  2. Add another case with PSU, SAS Expander and drive bays, the SAS expander should have at least one external adapter
  3. Add a cable connecting the new HBA to the SAS expander
  4. Add a dummy plug to the PSU so it doesn’t need a motherboard to power on.
  5. Power the SAS Expander and drive bays from the PSU
  6. Ta Da - extra drive bays

Or buy a disk shelf from ebay, connect as appropriate

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I bought a surplus/used 16 bay Supermicro expander chassis with drive trays. Came with the backplane, external expander connector on the rear, dual power supplies, cooling fans in a rack mount. I also picked up an HBA with external connectors and a cable. Including shipping was inexpensive and basically plug and play. I added the external HBA to the Truenas server and plugged in the external cable. Done.

4

While USB attached drives seem like an easy choice, the potential problems out weigh this choice for server functions.

Here is something I wrote years back:

To be fair, SATA & SAS disks have their own problems. They are pretty well understood, like cables & connector problems. Or SAS HBA over-heating problems.

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5

This is the issue. But if it’s the system in your signature

Dell HBA330 Adp controller card
1x Chelsio dual 10GB nic - connected to media server
1x 4 port Dell ethernet card - 1 port used to network

it seems that you could do without the second NIC.

Not sure if it actually works the way you intend…

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6

After a lot of searching, I’ve found the following, unless you can guide me to a better solution.

A case to put the drives in;

SilverStone CS380 V2 Mid Tower Case with 8x 2.5"/3.5" Hot-Swap SSD/HDD Bays - ATX Black.

See Here SilverStone CS380 V2 Mid Tower Case with 8x 2.5"/3.5" Hot-Swap SSD/HDD Bays - ATX Black LN99937 - SST-CS380 V2 | SCAN UK

This case also has a 2x 5.25 drive bays so I can add a converter and add 3x3.5 drive bays giving a total of 11 disks

A 100W PSU for the drive bays, 1000w to allow for the initial peaks when the hard drives spin up;

Thermaltake Toughpower SFX-L 1000 Watt Fully Modular PCIE 5 NATIVE 80+ Gold PSU/Power Supply ATX3.0

Then I come across the problems.

I need a Disk controller card that supports 12 external disks, although I suspect it will be 16, that is TrueNAS compatible, and gives good performance. something like this? Dell 065YGV ,AVAGO 9305-16E SAS/SATA 12Gb/s 16P EXTERNAL PCI-e 3.0 HBA H/profile

How will the disk controller connect to the Sata disks in the case? I suspect need a suitable cable, SFF-8484 / SFF-8087 or SFF-8643 / SFF-8644 (Mini-SAS HD). I will be moving some of my existing SATA drives to the new case. Do I need a port multiplier?

The idea is to have the existing Trunas server, with the additional disk storage physically next to it. I did think of using an internal disk controller, and running that cables outside to the 2nd case with the drives in it, but the servers would be back to back, but I’m worried about the cable length and electrical noise as there are 5 PCs above it.

What advice would you offer?

Thanks

7

So - I am assuming that the Silverstone has a PSU and drives - no compute - its just drives

In which case you need in the Dell an external HBA like the one you mention. You really only need an 8E, or even a 4E

In the Silverstone you put an adaptec SAS expander like an AEC-82885T 36 Port. This needs a molex for power. It does NOT need a PCIe slot in a board - it works just fine without being plugged into a motherboard

Then you run an external SAS cable between the two boxes, between your 4/8/16E card and the Adaptec.

From the adaptec you run forward break out cables (Mini-SAS HD to 4 SATA Forward Breakout Cable). Each one gives you 4 SATA/SAS drives you can use

You will need a device to pretend to be a motherboard, with a switch so you can turn on / off the Silverstone case - that easy and cheap ( 2PCS 50cm Cable Copper Tin Wire 24-Pin Female ATX PSU PC Supply Starter5165 | eBay UK )

That how I did it

8

You’ve seriously over complicated things

Firstly the two pools will give just over 10Gb total - how often are you hitting that?

I have

Server 10Gb → MikroTik 4 x 10Gb + 1Gb Switch ($120) → network

This lets me plug the 10 Gb capable devices together whilst having the 1Gb on their own switch

This means rather than 3 networks in your server you could have one

Heck you could insert that switch and use the 1 Gb link to the network

Server 10Gb x2 → Switch 4 x 10Gb in use → MediaServer 10Gb x2

Secondly you can get the likes of Highpoint RocketStor 6438TS ($600) that will add 8 bays to your system using the freed up slot and move either pool over