RPI 12vdc powered 10 x SATA HDD RAID6 enclosure

zr1hpc · August 30, 2018

The establishment of such a setup would be suitable for those in rural areas as they could use the sun to charge the car battery and it would also be useful to radio operators/ amateurs /hams who require a minimal noise environment so that audio and data collection and transmission is not impaired.

I am personally looking to build a Linux pc using 10 x SATA HDD's and two(2) IDE optical drives as well as a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B or perhaps a Beowulf cluster with an additional RPi3. The caveat is that the system must have NO fans or AC power and no switched mode power supplies may be used ie wall-warts. The purpose thereof is for whatever the user requires, and will scaled as such ie Firewall and proxy or as a file-server, or as a remote BBS etc.

The entire system must be powered by a simple +ve and -ve connection to be will run from a 12v car battery. The charging of the battery is beyond the scope of this topic.

What is needed is a method to supply SATA and IDE power directly from a 12v battery. Perhaps just as important is a SATA data switch that the HDD's can plug into and only have a single USB 2/3 connection to the RPI 2b or 3b.

The operation of the RPi from 12vdc is no issue as I have one currently, however as I only have limited USB ports I cannot connect multiple HDD's, besides the connections would be SATA not USB, so hence the requirement for the SATA switch. The incorporation of a SATA switch will also allow me to have a visual clue as to which drive/s in te array need replacing should they fail, without having to trawl through upteen log files.

I have trawled the net and Google and not found SATA switches that I seek, do they or SATA hubs exist?

Appreciated

Hylton

Alex Atkin UK · August 30, 2018

Is that a RPI as the PC or a PC AND A RPI for something else?

If its a PC then a PicoPSU is the best method for this, although its going to be quite the balancing act between how powerful a PC you build and how many HDDs the PSU can support. I'm not sure how long you could even run something like that on battery alone.

There is then the issue of having the PC detect if the battery is low and shutting down.