I don't know about now, but my first Linux OS was Ubuntu and I appreciated the long support because of this. That was in the dial up days, tho, I can't imagine why anyone would require that now ☠️
Systemd haters? But seriously, this could well be because of business environments where applications require specific OS versions to keep being supported by the vendor. Or better: where the orchestration tool cannot be updated because of the old OSs while said OSs cannot be updated because it will break orchestration.
This is why people love containers: you can run insecure software on insecure OS (component)s while pretending to be in control on your shiny Kubernetes cluster.
To summarize a few details, the PM1633A is a SAS3 (aka SAS 12 Gbps) SSD drive, which accepts an SFF-8482 plug. This SFF-8482 plug is the one named in the SAS3 standard for use on drives. You mention the LSI 9311 HBA, which does support SAS3 and has a pair of SFF-8643 receptacles, which is specified in the SAS3 standard for use on backplane aggregators. That is to say, when multiple drives are bundled up onto a single cable.
When used for SAS3, SFF-8643 supports up to four drives. And so you will find forward-breakout cables online that go from SFF-8643 to 4x SFF-8482.
The cable you mentioned – an SFF-8643 to SFF-8639 – is meant for U.2 drives. Because of the 4x PCIe lanes used for U.2, a single drive uses all the pins in an SFF-8643 plug, which is why this cable can only attach to a single drive. Because SFF-8639 is backwards compatible with SFF-8482, this could still be used for SAS3 drives, but it would waste the other three “lanes” in the cable.
With all that said, I would not recommend the cable you listed, and instead replace it with the aforementioned forward-breakout to 4x SFF-8482. This way, you can later buy three more SAS3 drives. I presume you’re not planning to ever use U.2 here.
Also, regarding the choice of HBA, was there a reason you chose the 9311? I have both the venerable 9300-8i and a newer 9305-16i. Both work great for me and support SAS3. It’s notable that power and heat is lower on the 9305. The 9300, 9305, and 9311 all have the same pair of SFF-8643 connectors.
Thank you for the much needed help. I have been clueless and trying to find a decent inexpensive solution.
QA: Q “was there a reason you chose the 9311?” A: no, only that it looked nice.
The 9300-8i is 1/4 the price so I will go with it.
I took a gamble on a cheap used drive purchase at $500 for local game installs. The drive arrives in 2 days. I couldn’t find out what connection type the drive had or power delivery needs
Here are the products I have selected based on your recommendation. Do these look like good choices?
The first link is an SFF-8087 to 4x SFF-8482. While this cable could technically support SAS3 speeds, the SFF-8087 connector was specified for SAS2, not SAS3. As a result, you won’t really find any HBAs that have an SFF-8087 connector and do SAS3 over it. This cable is incompatible with the 9300-8i from your second link. I would choose something more like this: www.amazon.com/dp/B01GPD5KFK . Also be advised that if your SSD isn’t recognized with this cable, the reviews mention that the 3.3v power pin – if you have one at all – might need to be disabled, to avoid PWDIS issues.
For the second link, that Inspur 9300-8i appears identical to the HBA I have, and it’s worked fine for me, although I only have SAS2 drives hooked up to it right now. The nice thing is that the listing advertises “IT mode”, which was important to me, because burning firmware to switch to IT mode is a sad experience.
EDIT: BTW, when you receive this drive, you should probably dump the SMART data to see how much lifetime is left on this SSD. This is an enterprise SSD, so it’s possible that it came from several years of use as a caching drive in a server somewhere. That could do a number to its remaining lifetime, but I would imagine its performance would fit well for your use-case.
An aside: one-to-many breakout cables have a forward and backward variety, and care must be taken to avoid buying the wrong one. This link explains the difference, which is still applicable to SAS3: …unraid.net/…/6723-sas-to-sata-cables-forward-or-…
Note that some combinations of backwards breakout cables simply don’t exist, so there might be only one version available for sale. Still, read the product descriptions carefully for which end is meant for the HBA and which end goes to drives or the backplane.
BTW OP: when you get this set up, please run some benchmarks and tell this community how it performs. I’ve had a free PM1633A sitting on my desk for 1.5 years, just because I haven’t gotten around to it. I’m keen to know how it behaves.
Sure, I would love too. Do you know what software to run in Windows to provide good results? I can temporarily attach it to my linux machine if necessary
I’m afraid I don’t have much experience with benchmarking in Windows. I think I’ve seen CrystalDiskMark mentioned in a few places, and it’s FOSS under MIT License.
Cool, I will give it a try. I may install it to my linux machine and access over samba. I need to test if game installs will work over network like this first
You’ll be better off trying to get a proper network attached storage (NAS) rather than an enclosure. Either buy a pre-made one or make one out of parts. That way you can use the network speeds. Or you could get a usb3 pcie card, they are very cheap these days.
If you’re in it for the long haul buy a “cheap” used server off of eBay and upgrade it.
If you want something more inexpensive buy the cheapest case you can find with the most HD mounting points. Then get yourself a SAS controller from eBay and connect everything up.
I got an HP DL380 with 16 drive bays, and I basically just dump any old hard drives in it whenever I upgrade. I have 24TB in it, had it for years, and I’ve only ever lost one drive at a time, and I just shrink out the dead drive, and then toss another one in if I get a new one. “I’ll move your files to your new computer if I can keep the old one…” I even 3d-printed a couple of 2.5"-3.5" adapters to stuff old laptop drives in there. Caddies? Uhh… I think it was 120$ from the local electronics recycler. It’s old, it’s slow, it’s basically a giant samba share.
For 100TB it’s worth looking into a dedicated storage server – there are tons of them available for cheap. labgopher makes it easy to track sales on ebay by price/storage/ram/whatever.
If I where you I would just buy a regular case that can fit a decent amount of HDDs like a fractal define 7 or one of its older versions and transplant your current computer into that with some new drives. 100tb is 5 20tb drives so you don’t need that many.
USB enclosures are not a great way to handle storage as USB tends to be unreliable.
I have a couple of servers (all 2.5" drives) and a disk shelf (for the much easer to get large volume 3.5" drives) attached to one of them with an external sas PCIe card. I could push that to 300+TB if I had the cash
100TB, external enclosures, no backups 🤔 I would pickup a used storage server with a lot of drive bays from eBay. The external bays seem attractive but I’ve never heard good stories about performance or reliability.
datahoarder
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.