Well I was never really happy about using the tower PC case that I mentioned in the previous NAS post, it was just too big and bulky, so I continued looking for alternate solutions.
Eventually I settled on using an EMC KTN-STL3 unit that can hold 15 x 3.5″ SAS drives in a short 3U enclosure.
The version I found on Ebay came with 9 x 3TB SAS ‘data’ hard drives and 5 x 200GB SAS solid state ‘flash’ drives and I picked it up for £220.00 and collected it from 5 minutes around the corner from where I live.
I will look for an additional 6 or more 3TB SAS drives and at least one more disk caddy.
This is just a dumb disk unit with a couple of controllers, so it needs some form of ‘head unit’ to provide the Operating system and ‘brains’
I found a Sophos WS500 Web Appliance 1U server on Ebay for £50.00 and free P&P, this is basically a SuperMicro 512L case with a SuperMicro X7SBi motherboard with an Intel Xeon E2160 1.8GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD.
I was effectively buying the item for the 1U case and power supply as the current internals were not really going to cut it.
The new motherboard was a SuperMicro X10SLH-N6-ST031 that has 6 x 10GB ethernet interfaces on-board and an IPMI interface, it has one x16 and one x8 PCI-E slot.
I purchased an Intel Xeon E3-1271 V3 Quad Core 3.60GHz CPU ($27.98 – I was going to be in the USA on holiday), 4 x 8GB ECC DDR3 PC3L-12800E DIMMs of Server Ram (£35.00) to complete the server end.
I also needed to buy a right angle adapter ($16.00) to mount a SAS9201-16E HBA card (£35.00)
I reused the 2 x 360GB 2.5″ SATA disks on which I did the initial install for the Tower case build, I just needed to connect to the IPMI console and change the network interface settings.
Current layout of the internals, although I will almost certainly replace the squirrel fan with some 40mm case fans as it is pretty noisy, I may also replace the 40mm fan on the power supply.
Connection between the ‘head unit and the disk chassis will be with one or more Mini SAS 26 Pin SFF-8088 to SF 8088 cables.
