Square Peg in a Round Hole (NI HDD-8265)

Kirino · April 1

I work for "Insert Major Company Here", and we are moving warehouses and scrapping out old inventory that hasn't moved. So, I have acquired two National Instruments HDD-8265's that I would love to be able to set up in my rack at home as a JBOD, however, they are PXI Chassis and that is way out of my wheelhouse.

There is no motherboard, just an ARC1882IX-12/16/24 Ver. 3A Raid Card, which is connected to and being powered by, via a PCIx16 Slot Card OSS-ECA-1x4-1x6. This seems to be how it's intended to connect to the host system, however I don't have the cable for this, and it cost at best $700 for that..

I know the RAID Card is able to do what I want, however without a way for it to talk to a host system to set it up, it's basically just a brick. I had one idea, but I'd rather run it by someone who knows more than I about this than just spend any more time trying to rig a way around the inevitable.

Q: Can I attach up this RAID Card to my home server in a free PCIe Slot, while leaving all the MiniSAS ports connected to the drives in the PXI Chassis, do the setup for the Raid Card in BIOS, them place it back into the PXI Chassis and use the Web Based UI to configure the rest? It makes sense in my head, but that could be due to a lack of insight.

Only other thing I don't know how to accomplish in turning on the PXI Chassis itself, as it's designed to receive a signal from the Host PC, and does not have a Power On feature.

Appreciate any insight, feedback, or knowledge.

HDD-8265.pdf ARC1882_series_Quick_Start_Guide.pdf

Needfuldoer · April 1

The "RAID card" inside that drive shelf might actually be a SAS expander. (A SAS expander just lets more drives connect to a SAS controller. Think "network switch" but for SAS instead of Ethernet.)

If that's the case, you might only need a SAS controller for your PC that has an external interface which matches the shelf's interface. (SAS expanders may sit in a PCIe slot, but they only use the slot for power. They don't act like SAS controllers themselves.) You don't necessarily need the special card that came with that specific shelf; generic LSI SAS cards and cables are all over eBay for pennies on the dollar.

Honestly, this thing doesn't sound like it's worth running. It's old, weird, and power-hungry. If you want to mess with a drive shelf, get one that's better understood by the homelab community, like a DellEMC or HP StorageWorks.

Kirino · April 1

It is a SAS Controller (not sure if it is an expander) with RAID functionality. It has it's own BIOS software "McRAID" or something. It has an SFF-8088 port on the back of the card, but I don't believe connecting that to my server would do much without having it set up first (I have no idea).

As far as it being old and weird, yeah, it is, but if it can get the job done, it's good enough for me. At the end of the day, I got these for free, I don't have the money to buy one myself, so if there was a way I could get these working, great, if not, nothing really lost.

Edited April 1 by Kirino
Adding better wording

BigFatTeddy · April 2

I have used systems like that about 15 years ago, and to be honest I wouldn't go for that PCIe-cable. That was always a troubled thing. I learned a lot about repairing ZFS on Solaris with these when you would just lose an entire shelf because the PCIe controller would decide to reset the PCIe bus.

As I understood it, the backplane in your system will connect to the SFF-8643 of the Areca-controller? If that's the case, you might be able to adapter the shit out of this and get the areca simply out of that thing and use something like this:

https://www.startech.com/de-de/kabel/sff86448plt2

Which would get you the SAS-connection to the outside world. Maybe some nice little metallwork to get some of those installed. Then you could figure out how to power on the the thing and you're off to the races.