Reddit reviews Rosewill RSV 4 x 3.5-Inch HDD Cage RASA-11001

Given the amount of space the SG13 has without a GPU, you could probably fit one of these in there and make this into a pretty sweet NAS box.

I have a dremeled Silverstone plus a ghetto plexiglass "cage" at 12 drives:
http://i.imgur.com/Qu8ynKw.jpg

If I rebuild it, I'm going to stack these:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005FHHOXE?colid=2Q7V5ZSF4I0E5&coliid=I1XFUWW1KRXRZD&ref_=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_ttl

Well I ended up going with this in the end: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B005FHHOXE/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o06_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I will need to buy longer cables to make it work though :/

By machine do you mean another physical box? Because you'll need somewhere to put those disks. A popular solution is Dell PowerVault, connected to your R720 with an HBA with external ports. If you had a spare case and power supply, you could also get some breakout cables from the external SAS ports to SATA. If you only need a few SATA disks a simple enclosure like this Rosewill metal cage would work. Just sit it outside the cage somewhere and power the drives.

I've done this with a spare power supply and a "power supply testing switch" like this one here.

EDIT: Here's a link to the SFF-8088 to SATA cable which will connect an external HBA like the Dell H200e directly to SATA drives.

For any builders running out of room in their cases.... here is what I did, worked out nicely:
4x hdds in three optical bays
https://www.amazon.com/Rosewill-RSV-3-5-Inch-Cage-RASA-11001/dp/B005FHHOXE/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1504617542&sr=1-1&keywords=4+cage

4x sata power splitter:
https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Power-Splitter-Adapter-PYO4SATA/dp/B0086OGN9E/ref=sr_1_20?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1504617639&sr=1-20&keywords=4+sata+cable

Damn, too rich for my blood. Lol. I’ll prob just end up using this hard drive cage and jerry rig it to fit/work.

E: thanks for the info tho.

I haven't done it myself, but you could try getting something like this: https://smile.amazon.com/Rosewill-RSV-3-5-Inch-Cage-RASA-11001/dp/B005FHHOXE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1486086571&sr=8-2&keywords=3.5%22+hard+drive+cage

You could mount it with strong double sided tape to the very bottom of the case where that single extra 3.5" mounting spot is. There's a couple other options on amazon for less drive slots, but this was the cheapest and seems like it'd be easy to mod into place.

Lol nah I'm good. I just wanna fit [these](Rosewill RSV 4 x 3.5-Inch HDD Cage RASA-11001 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FHHOXE) into the case instead.

I bought that but it does not cool very well at all if you do sandwich 3 disks in there. Poor air channel, poor air gap, subpar fan. My disks were running 45+c - Are yours doing better?

I found this to be better: https://www.amazon.com/Rosewill-RSV-3-5-Inch-Cage-RASA-11001/dp/B005FHHOXE - but the downside is that there are no threaded holes for mounting so you gotta get creative or use some serious elbow grease.

I have one case with 1 and another case with 3. The drives stay nice and cool.

I have one of these. I assume it's the same cage as what is in this rosewill chassis. Any idea where to get replacement hdd rails like the blue ones included with the chassis instead of the lame square ones the hdd rack standalone comes with?

To accomplish this you would need an entire chassis, as the 3.5” model has a different internal configuration. If you’re creative, you could probably rig something up if you got a 3.5” backplane. If you don’t mind a bit of a mess, you could do what I did with my R410 and buy these extension cables and house the drives in these actively cooled drive enclosures. You’ll also want a sata to molex adapter to power the fan in the enclosure.

Pretty much this. There are lots of cheap HP 24 Port PCI-E 3Gb SAS Expanders on ebay and some are even sold with cables, but probably not the cables you'd need. You'd probably want Forward Breakout Cables. You also need a way to power them and there are PCIe power attachments, that are commonly used on mining rigs, might work. I think the USB portion is only for data, so you'd need to find cables for molex to sata (15pin?). You could use 3-4 HBA expanders into a cheap external port card like 9200-16E. You'll also need multiple power splitters to spread power to all these HDDs.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/New-HP-SAS-Expander-Card-24-Port-SAS-PCI-E-Expander-Board-468405-001/171532956108
https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-SFF-8087-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073RBP3V6
https://www.ebay.com/itm/372102178384
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0086OGN9E/

Are these 2.5 or 3.5 HDDs? Without a case the 3.5 HDDs will vibrate and probably can cause connection and data issues, so definitely have a backup and expect the HDDs to quit working here and there. This is also rather power consuming for how much storage space you get.

Even though the price of data cables, expanders, power cables start to creep up, I still think if you construct your own case then it would be cheaper than anything prebuilt. Buying anything to hold the drives would be costly, even buying 12 of these to hold 48 drives would cost $204 alone and you have no cables or anything. Some have built their own by fastening metal brackets together (standalone or within select cases), but this lacks rubber needed for vibration protection... This also doesnt account for how you'll cool the HDDs, but perhaps one big fan could get you by. Post some updates and pictures if you decide to commence on "Project Janky", gluck.
https://www.amazon.com/Rosewill-5-25-Inch-3-5-Inch-Hot-swap-SATAIII/dp/B005FHHOXE
https://imgur.com/3xsabQU
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/aceglg/new_build_in_progress/

I had to get off mobile so I can put out something more long winded. My specific build is one of cost vs performance and having a clear upgrade path in mind. Let's start with what I originally bought.

​

>Base Computer Lenovo TS140 w/ i3-4130 & 4GB DDR3

This computer served me well for a cheap personal computer always with the intention of making it a server. It was relatively cheap at the time ($230 off Amazon), supported ECC RAM, and had 5 onboard SATA ports along with enough PCIE connectors. I did need to get a customer connector to hook up a generic PSU to the motherboard, but that was cheap and widely available.

​

This is what the machine currently is

>Intel Xeon E3-1245 v3 ($165 - ebay used)
>
>32GB ECC DDR3 RAM (ebay as well)
>
>5 x 4GB Seagate NAS (ironwolf) drives in Raid Z1 (media storage)
>
>5 x 4GB WD Red drives in Raid Z1 (media overflow / archive)
>
>2 x 4GB Seagate NAS drives in Mirror (network storage)
>
>Zalman ATX Mid Tower Case - Black MS800
>
>3 x 3x5.25 to 4x3.5 similar to but not this model https://www.amazon.com/Rosewill-RSV-3-5-Inch-Cage-RASA-11001/dp/B005FHHOXE/ref=sr_1_24
>
>IBM ServeRAID M1015 crossflashed to LSI9211-8i IT mode
>
>[ https://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/ ]

​

With all that out of the way, there are a few caveats with my rig, so I don't recommend recreating it exactly.

​

>#1 There is an issue with the TS140 motherboard and a FreeNAS 11.2 bootloader bug causing it to freeze on boot. I'd recommend a supermicro server PCB if you can swing it. You'll often get more onboard SATA so you may be able to ditch the LSI card I have for more SATA io.
>
>#2 The upgrade path for the TS140 only has support for 32GB of RAM. FreeNAS recommends running 1GB of RAM for every 1TB of storage for optimal use. Also, don't run FreeNAS without ECC RAM, you'll be asking for trouble.
>
>#3 You may want to use larger hard drives, but I keep with 4TB because of the price per GB you get from these drives. Watch when these go on sale at Microcenter or Amazon and you can get them for around $100 a piece.
>
>#4 Crossflashing the cheaper IBM card to the more expensive LSI card is a great hack, but it was the biggest pain in the ass. Some motherboards just don't fully support flashing over PCIE. Some need to boot into BIOS, others needed UEFI and in the end I almost gave up. It took many different trials on a couple different mobos to get the Goldilocks config.
>
>#5 I don't remember the power supply used, but you need a decent one for all those mechanical drives to spin up on boot. I used https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator to make sure I had enough juice.

Why not skip the raid enclosure. Seems like a waste of $70 to hold two drives. I got an LSI SAS/RAID controller for $80 which will handle the 8 8tb drives I plan to hook up to it. Does your tower not have space for the drives?

I only have a mid tower that can squeeze about 8 3.5” drives so I plan on using this server cage to hold more drives. At $15 it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than the enclosure you mention. Rosewill RSV 4 x 3.5-Inch HDD Cage RASA-11001 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FHHOXE/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_c_api_BA8GAbMR9B9JJ

I'm using this in one of my boxes.

Amazon Link, and cheaper to boot.

Drive mounting is different, with toolless sleds rather than screwed on slide rails, but it's essentially the same part.

I bought these for a custom case I'm building in an old cheap filing cabinet and I've found them to be very quiet: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005FHHOXE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1