Expanding my server's storage with a SAS JBOD

this sun server right here is my primary server used for a lot of my home lab duties and just messing around with server stuff with it's also a pretty big nas with four eight terabyte drives four four terabyte drives and four 500 gig drives problem is all those drives are basically full now so i don't really have any more space to put my files and there's a few solutions to this the first solution would be to just add more drives to the system but the problem is all of these bays on the server are full so the easy solution isn't there the next solution is to replace some of my drives with larger drives like replacing these 500 gigs i have in here with like a new 14 tail drive the problem is i already have a lot of hard drives laying around that are smaller so i'm going with another approach and it's this using the sas j-bot here so this is a sas j-bot which essentially means a big external hard drive now this isn't like a normal external hard drive that connects via usb or esata this connects via sas which is more of a large server type connection and the advantages of sas is it supports port multipliers built in so it can be split from like four ports here in this case to 12 and it's also just better when it comes to server use when it comes to longer distances signal integrity and speed as this cable i'm using here will allow for 24 gigabits of speed as it has four six gigabit channels but unfortunately for me i didn't make myself a super plug and play configuration because i'm gonna be using internal sas ports on my server here because i have extra ports from the built-in sas expander on my cisco server and i'm going to be using the internal port on here because i can't easily get an sff 8643 to sff 8088 cable i'm going to be going to the internal sff 8087 cable let's take a closer look at this super micro jbod to take a look at what i'm talking about here this super micro jbot i believe is built off the 846 chassis that they have and it's pretty darn simple taking a look inside what it's doing as you can see there's no motherboard processors ram or any of that stuff all it has is the drive bays in the front and then this little cable that connects the front drive base to this little connector in the back and this connector on the back is sff88 which is an older sas cable now and why i'm going to need the adapter and what i'm going to do today is i'm going to use this cable that i got here run a connection through the back of it to here and then run this cable up to my main server this is the inside of my main server here and looking at the middle here i can see all those ports here this is the built-in sas expander that plugs this little card on the left here which is my hba on the sas expander as i can see there's three empty sff 8643 ports that i can plug my external jbod into and because this is kind of a hacky job i'm just going to route it through one of these back pci express ports well it was a tight fit but i got the cable connected so both of these two guys are now essentially one whole unit when it comes to storage and this system now has access to all 24 drive bays on both of these um it is as simple as just plugging in the power and turning on the sas cables so they're both plugged in but i only see the blue lights on some of these so i'm not sure what that means but everything from here should be softer configuration from now on oh my drives and my sas jbod weren't showing up originally and it just didn't seem to work when it was being plugged into the sas expander in my cisco server so i had to replug the cables in a different way to get it to work instead of using the cable which i wanted to use the ssf 8087 to 8643 i had to unplug one of the ports from the internal hba inside this server and plug it with an sff 8087 to an sff 8088 cable and then just use the integrated sff 8088 external ports on the sas jbod from supermicro it's not as optimal in my opinion because i still don't get the full bandwidth to all of these drives but it works perfectly fine and 24 gigabit for each set of these 12 drives is perfectly fine for my use so i don't think it'll cause any real world issues and right now all the drives show up in software for this server so it's time to start configuring the drives and making it work correctly now let's talk about software and how i'm going to set up these drives in this system so my main server runs proxmox and since zfs is included and i'm a big zfs fan boy i'm just going to use zfs here and taking a look at my screen running lsbok i can see all the new disks here so i can find all seven of the two terabyte hard drives it currently has in it which is great which is exactly what i want and the cool thing with these sas jbods is it's exactly the same as if you added the system drive locally so i can do something like smart control of the drive and get all of the data so if i run sdx for example i can see that this is a two terabyte drive and i see full smart data that it has like 37 000 hours and stuff so these aren't new drives at all so now my question is how do i want to use them so my current plan is to make a single raid z2 with all eight of these two terabyte hard drives that makes the most sense to me as it gives me the six terabytes of space i need for that seed box already i think it gives me a little bit of extra playground which i'm going to put some vms on that i use left often and some other things i plan to get this pool relatively fragmented and just i o heavy and that leaves my main pool so it has less i o and less activity for my like video projects and other activities that i want to have more speed at so let's set that up now so i'm going to do sudo z pool um create i'm going to call it seed for seed box and then we're going to just do raid z2 and i'm going to just start dis listing the disks now technically this is s now this is a sub-optimal way to do this because you should be using the ids of the drive instead of just the drive letters so i've created a raid z2 and it's telling me that it's already part of a pool so i've used these hard drives in a different pool in the past and it's complaining so i'm gonna have to put the dash f flag in so that it make sure to overwrite all the other data on the drive well i found a weird issue when i was using the dash f flag was getting an out of memory arrow so i wiped them all with white fs-a and now it creates it so now i have this pool which has 14.5 tibi bytes of free space basically nothing used and i get to start copying files from my seed nas as i like to call it so i'm going to copy those six terabytes of files on here and then start copying some vms to help manage my data better i'm going to create a few different zfs data sets to copy the data to so i'm going to create like a seed slash seed box i'm going to create a seed slash vms to store some vm data on it and maybe i'll make just like a temp files one two to store some chem files on so now i have a few data sets on here and then i'm gonna start copying files setting up some nfs shares and just using it as my main data store i had a lot of options though with drives that i could do things like adding another set of drives to my main z pool and adding another v dev in the pool i could have set them up with md adm i could have done many other things but i just thought it'd be simpler to create a single raid z2 and start kind of separating the data in that pool i also find it nice to kind of separate pools based off the i o i expect on the pools because that way if i have like a pool that's seeding with a lot of little rights i can have my main nash show not be affected by that which just helps increase the speed of my main drives thanks for watching this little video about upgrading my nas by adding a sas jbod filled with drives and subscribe for more videos like this in the future

Channel: ElectronicsWizardry

Views: 13,453

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Id: fIaom0JfUlU

Length: 7min 46sec (466 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022