Planning a JBOD-installation and have some questions :)

[LarsV]

Hey guys. I would like to experiment with a JBOD so I want to buy one used. For example something like SUN STORAGE J4400 ARRAY which has plenty of space, a SAS - SFF-8088 so I can buy a used HBA card like for my PC  https://www.ebay.de/itm/312095951968?hash=item48aa5e4c60:g:0a0AAOSwwRlbenv9 and maybe daisy chain some later.

Now my problems/questions:

- In the Sun system overview (https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19928-01/820-3223-14/820-3223-14.pdf) it says on page 17 "...or 72 TB for SATA II disks (750 GB per disk) for the J4400.". Is there a limit which disks you can put in those JBODs? I was planning with more than 750GB disks...

- If I buy such a JBOD without drive bay caddys: Do I need those specific drive bay caddys? Can you use other SUN? For example https://www.ebay.com/itm/233254808414?hash=item364f11eb5e:g:eE0AAOSwwYlc~~6g? Those caddys have 2TB in the name so is there a limit because of the caddys? Or can you use different bays maybe even from a different manufacturer like IBM, HP or NetApp? 

 

Because those caddys are freaking expensive if you ask me...

 

I hope you can enlighten me  

Greetings from germany.

[Domrockt]

Hello my fellow German, i did buy the J4400 and as for now the LSI SAS3801E 3G RAID Controller L3-01123-04E Storage SAS PCIe x8 2x SFF-8088 3Gb Card should be here by 12 oClock, when Hermes got it sh*t together.

 I do own a lot of 2tb sas drives and i Hope they will Just be found.

 

I give you a Report by this evening how it went.

[LarsV]

6 minutes ago, Domrockt said:

Hello my fellow German, i did buy the J4400 and as for now the LSI SAS3801E 3G RAID Controller L3-01123-04E Storage SAS PCIe x8 2x SFF-8088 3Gb Card should be here by 12 oClock, when Hermes got it sh*t together.

 I do own a lot of 2tb sas drives and i Hope they will Just be found.

 

I give you a Report by this evening how it went.

Wow what a coincidence  I am rooting for Hermes now!

[Domrockt]

So it works with 2 TB drives, no caddys needed, i used HDD screws to use them as sliders.  As for now i wait for an old HBA Card from a friend of myne so i can make a HW RAID with two 2TB SATA Drives to get them recognized as 4tb in my unraid Array so i can unbalance my 8TB SATA Drive free from Data to use it as Chia Farm Drive. I think that this 8tb Drive will Work with this jbod.

 

Edited May 14, 2021 by Domrockt

[LarsV]

3 hours ago, Domrockt said:

So it works with 2 TB drives, no caddys needed, i used HDD screws to use them as sliders.  As for now i wait for an old HBA Card from a friend of myne so i can make a HW RAID with two 2TB SATA Drives to get them recognized as 4tb in my unraid Array so i can unbalance my 8TB SATA Drive free from Data to use it as Chia Farm Drive. I think that this 8tb Drive will Work with this jbod.

 

Wow thank you so much!Especially for the tip with the screws. That is such a huge cost saviour when you dont need the caddys! And pls update this post when you have tested the 8TB drive. I want to use maybe 8Tb or 10TB.

[Pixel5]

what exactly is the thing you want to experiment with and why do you need an old outdated server for this?

 

JBOD means just a bunch of disks which you could have in any PC without the need to buy old server hardware.

[LarsV]

5 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

what exactly is the thing you want to experiment with and why do you need an old outdated server for this?

 

JBOD means just a bunch of disks which you could have in any PC without the need to buy old server hardware.

I don't need an old outdated server. I get 3 GW2000h w/GW175h/q F1 fully equiped (96 cores and 384GB of RAM even if it is outdated should be fun to tinker with) for 150€ and want to try chia plotting with them and for that I need cheap and easy to administrate diskspace. If it doesn't work maybe I do something different with them or I just resell them.  

[Pixel5]

50 minutes ago, LarsV said:

I don't need an old outdated server. I get 3 GW2000h w/GW175h/q F1 fully equiped (96 cores and 384GB of RAM even if it is outdated should be fun to tinker with) for 150€ and want to try chia plotting with them and for that I need cheap and easy to administrate diskspace. If it doesn't work maybe I do something different with them or I just resell them.  

this hardware is basically useless for chia farming because you want to have at least one NVME SSD for that.

Having space is the easy part of chia farming, plotting so you actually have anything to farm is what takes time and most importantly takes an absolute ton of space on a very fast SSD.

With this system you cant even use the full speed of a SATA SSD because this system is so old that its still running with SATA 2 instead of SATA 3 so everything would run at half the max speed if you install any SSD´s

 

The reason why you can get this system so cheap is because nobody wants this stuff, its super power hungry and slow by todays standard.

The system you mentioned was build around the AMD Opteron 6000 series so im not sure where you get the 96 cores from but lets assume you get the top of the line Opteron 6386 SE the fastest one ever made which comes with 16 cores and you get a quad socket motherboard you now have 64 cores in this system and this system will be about 3,5x as fast as a freaking core i3 10100 while consuming almost 9 times the energy for the CPU´s alone this is not accounting for the higher power consumption of all the RAM and system in general.

 

With the good old super high electricity prices in Germany combined with his super inefficient hardware you will pay approximately two times what you pay to buy this system just to keep this system running at idle for a year.

If you do anything on this system you and double or tripple that easily.

 

This is exactly why nobody wants these systems, they may be cheap to buy up front but the cost to run them is so insane that its basically always a better idea to buy modern hardware.

[Kilrah]

40 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

im not sure where you get the 96 cores from but lets assume you get the top of the line Opteron 6386 SE the fastest one ever made which comes with 16 cores and you get a quad socket motherboard you now have 64 cores in this system

He said he has 3 of those servers, so 3x dual 16 cores = 96 total.

 

 

[LarsV]

10 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

this hardware is basically useless for chia farming because you want to have at least one NVME SSD for that.

Having space is the easy part of chia farming, plotting so you actually have anything to farm is what takes time and most importantly takes an absolute ton of space on a very fast SSD.

With this system you cant even use the full speed of a SATA SSD because this system is so old that its still running with SATA 2 instead of SATA 3 so everything would run at half the max speed if you install any SSD´s

 

The reason why you can get this system so cheap is because nobody wants this stuff, its super power hungry and slow by todays standard.

The system you mentioned was build around the AMD Opteron 6000 series so im not sure where you get the 96 cores from but lets assume you get the top of the line Opteron 6386 SE the fastest one ever made which comes with 16 cores and you get a quad socket motherboard you now have 64 cores in this system and this system will be about 3,5x as fast as a freaking core i3 10100 while consuming almost 9 times the energy for the CPU´s alone this is not accounting for the higher power consumption of all the RAM and system in general.

 

With the good old super high electricity prices in Germany combined with his super inefficient hardware you will pay approximately two times what you pay to buy this system just to keep this system running at idle for a year.

If you do anything on this system you and double or tripple that easily.

 

This is exactly why nobody wants these systems, they may be cheap to buy up front but the cost to run them is so insane that its basically always a better idea to buy modern hardware.

Hmmm thanks man. I did more research and yea I would get 3 Server with 4 CPUs each so there is the 96 cores. But in passMark for example a 5900x would roughly be in the same range xD so thanks for the warning! Will watch for something else but the JBOD still is a good idea I think.

[Domrockt]

On 5/14/2021 at 10:13 PM, LarsV said:

Wow thank you so much!Especially for the tip with the screws. That is such a huge cost saviour when you dont need the caddys! And pls update this post when you have tested the 8TB drive. I want to use maybe 8Tb or 10TB.

Tomorrow is the day, i will be back this evening with an result.

Edited May 18, 2021 by Domrockt
still moving steamcache took about 14hrs

[Domrockt]

On 5/15/2021 at 10:12 PM, Pixel5 said:

this hardware is basically useless for chia farming because you want to have at least one NVME SSD for that.

Having space is the easy part of chia farming, plotting so you actually have anything to farm is what takes time and most importantly takes an absolute ton of space on a very fast SSD.

With this system you cant even use the full speed of a SATA SSD because this system is so old that its still running with SATA 2 instead of SATA 3 so everything would run at half the max speed if you install any SSD´s

 

The reason why you can get this system so cheap is because nobody wants this stuff, its super power hungry and slow by todays standard.

The system you mentioned was build around the AMD Opteron 6000 series so im not sure where you get the 96 cores from but lets assume you get the top of the line Opteron 6386 SE the fastest one ever made which comes with 16 cores and you get a quad socket motherboard you now have 64 cores in this system and this system will be about 3,5x as fast as a freaking core i3 10100 while consuming almost 9 times the energy for the CPU´s alone this is not accounting for the higher power consumption of all the RAM and system in general.

 

With the good old super high electricity prices in Germany combined with his super inefficient hardware you will pay approximately two times what you pay to buy this system just to keep this system running at idle for a year.

If you do anything on this system you and double or tripple that easily.

 

This is exactly why nobody wants these systems, they may be cheap to buy up front but the cost to run them is so insane that its basically always a better idea to buy modern hardware.

You dont need an nvme Drive for fast plotting.

I use them to maximize my Output.

 

I have 12*2tb sas Drives each does one Plot in 14hrs with my nvmes combined i can achive 20-25plots a day.

 

SATA ii is fine for storage or Chia plotting on any HDD. 

 

You can tackle the Problem from diffrent ways.

 

For the Opteron systems, yes thats not the best Base to Work with.