Reddit reviews Lenovo 70F10000UX THINKSERVER SA120 DIRECT ATTACHED STORAGE,1 I/O MODULE,12 X 3.5IN HOT-SWAP SAS D

Well...

Drives 48 @ $119 each https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00KIVMRWU

$5712 total

Enclosures 4 @ $197 each
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00LSQOY6G


$6500 total
Trays 48 @ $9.99 each
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00IF1DXR8


$6979.52 total


Controller card 1 @ $32.64
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002QJZLCA

Total $7012.16

Then you could just use whatever cheap computer you have lying around that has a pcie slot.
This would give you 120tb in RAID1 (mirrored), so at least losing a drive wouldn't be catastrophic.

You could live dangerously and halve the price and just stripe the drives.

Obviously most of the cost here is in the drives and you just aren't going to find much cheaper than $119 for 5tb.

You say your budget is $7k before drives, but drives ARE the budget for something with this much space. Whatever you are going to use to house/control them honestly doesn't need to cost much more than $1000 if even that. The rest of it will be drive cost. There's probably a larger JBOD enclosure for cheaper instead of having 4 of them.

Edit: Formatting

I was just in this position.. I've got an older i7 box with 24GB of ram, and had 8x3TB drives crammed into the tower forming a RAID-6 array that was ~97% full. I'm running openmediavault to manage the storage simply because I prefer Linux to something like FreeBSD. It also has a PLEX plugin as well, and I run PLEX on the storage box locally.

After a lot of research, I purchased the following.

LSI 9200-8e - SAS HBA - ~$40

Lenovo ThinkSever SA120 DAS - ~$200

12 drive caddies / trays for the DAS (optional, but suggested) - check eBay, ~$100 total. You can use the caddies that come with the SA120 but need to dremel them and drill screw holes.

I moved all of my drives to the DAS (Except OS drive) leaving 4 more bays for expansion. I added 2 more 3TB drives and grew the array (actually still waiting on that to finish...).

So for ~$350 I moved to a much more flexible setup (you can actually daisy chain the DAS's, so you can buy another one for 12 more bays when you're ready) and extended the life of the setup by quite a bit.

These will serve you MUCH, MUCH better than an eSATA enclosure:

• Enclosure Link
  
• Controller Card Link (req)
  
  And for about $230... would cost you close to what a 6-8 bay eSATA enclosure would cost you anyways.
  
  

Since you're already using DrivePool: You can swap drive letters to mount points super easily, even if a drive is already in a pool.

• Go to Windows disk management, right-click volume, "change drive letters and paths"
  
  
• Select "add", "mount in the following empty NTFS folder". Make a folder somewhere, like C:\Drives\HD - Some Name.
  
  
• Wait ~15 seconds, the DrivePool UI will update to change to the mount point automatically.
  
  
• Remove the drive letter from the list of drives/paths in disk management. Voila!
  
  If you want to just add a shitload of drive bays to your existing computer, without going the NAS/server route, get a DAS.
  
  
• Thinkserver SA120 is 12 bays for ~$240. Sometimes cheaper on eBay, but can buy Amazon-fulfilled too: https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-70F10000UX-THINKSERVER-ATTACHED-HOT-SWAP/dp/B00LSQOY6G/
  
  
• You'll need an HBA card (host bus adapter) with an external connector. eBay a LSI SAS9200-8e for ~$60-75.
  
  
• At this point, you just need drive caddies, which kind of suck at $5-10/ea from overseas eBay sellers.
  
  
• There are other DAS options out there, sometimes with slower connection speeds, more bays, etc. If you go the SA120 route make sure you look up the software to slow the fan speeds from their default "you're in a hot data center" mode.

I picked mine up from Amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LSQOY6G

Be advised, it only comes with airflow blanks, so you'll need to pickup drive caddies for each drive you plan to install (up to 12).

Drive caddy: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00T4SZ720/

Mine also only came with one PSU, so if you want the redundant PSU, will need to find one separately (I have not found a decently priced one yet) if your seller does not include both. There are several seller options when I purchased...I went with one that was new in box.

I bought two of these. They come with the cable.


Lenovo 70F10000UX THINKSERVER SA120 DIRECT ATTACHED STORAGE,1 I/O MODULE,12 X 3.5IN ... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LSQOY6G/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_c_api_Sq9gzbXQAX3A8

Jesus Christ, is there a reason that these start at $3000? You're not going to be running a whole lot of VMs on an i3. Why not an E5 Xeon setup with a DAS or two?

Edit: if you don't want a beefy CPU build something and go with a couple of these

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00LSQOY6G/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1466224279&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=sa120&dpPl=1&dpID=41AYVHtwgRL&ref=plSrch

Along with this

https://www.amazon.com/SAS9200-8E-8PORT-Ext-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002QJZLCA

That leaves you a ton of money for drives and the system

You didn't ask me, but you could get a Lenovo SA120, LSI 9200-8e, and the appropriate cable for under $300 – leaving some cash for Lenovo drive trays.

(Note also that none of these parts are necessarily ideal for you; for example, the MSA60 costs less and includes trays but has its own drawbacks. It's hard to say without knowing requirements.)

Lenovo ThinkServer SA120. 6 Gigabit. I got one and it works awesome. Pretty cheap brand new too.

https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-70F10000UX-THINKSERVER-ATTACHED-HOT-SWAP/dp/B00LSQOY6G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496014402&sr=8-1&keywords=lenovo+sa120

It's a very niche market - no major vendor bothers to build such systems. If you want a pre-built brandname you might be better off getting a DAS enclosure like Lenovo SA120 instead.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00LSQOY6G/ref=dp_olp_new_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=new

$230 shipped seems pretty reasonable

HBA for $24, and then the SA120, Currently $240 with Prime, but the price on the JBOD's changes seemingly daily

Here are the trays/caddies, but watch out for a good deal as I have seen them for as low as $4

How about this Lenovo SA120 ?

You will need hdd caddies or hack the spacers

So this ?

Ah so you want to use some kinda physical enclosure then! Something like a Lenovo SA120 to put harddrives in and then connect to a HW RAID card and create your array , that makes sense now.

I see people using the Dell H200 card outside of Dell hardware for FreeNAS , however if you're using a HDD enclosure for the array how do you plan to interface with it? Do you plan to use SFF-8087 (internal) to SFF 8088 (external) cables (which do exist, just messy)? Or do you plan to get another RAID card with SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 (external SAS).


It really should just work, as long as its supported by the host OS or guest OS if its being passed to a VM it should work without a hitch, now depending on the RAID card you may have a second menu at POST/Boot to select the onboard RAID card + the new one to configure the array(s) in.

If this helps at all, I bought one of these and it works perfectly.

Lenovo 70F10000UX THINKSERVER SA120 DIRECT ATTACHED STORAGE

I'm not sure you'll find a better deal.

> https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-70F10000UX-THINKSERVER-ATTACHED-HOT-SWAP/dp/B00LSQOY6G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495432354&sr=8-1&keywords=lenovo+das

You can use that with SATA drives.

Would love to see a rack mounted case that could accomplish this. Found this but I don't want to use SAS hard drives.

https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-70F10000UX-THINKSERVER-ATTACHED-HOT-SWAP/dp/B00LSQOY6G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495432354&sr=8-1&keywords=lenovo+das

I was/am looking into Lenovo SA120s and LSI SAS9200-8E for my expansion. My only concern with the SE3016 is the backplane & max drive capacity.

Why not get a Lenovo SA120 for $200 with a 3 year warranty?

https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-70F10000UX-THINKSERVER-ATTACHED-HOT-SWAP/dp/B00LSQOY6G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468287683&sr=8-1&keywords=sa120

Nice! Problem is it's plum full... Got 5 drives in there and can't fit another... Thinking I'll get an SA120 to attach