JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

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JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by lurch99 » Sat Dec 01, 2012 11:32 am

Hi Folks,

I'm curious if anyone can recommend any kind of enclosure that does NOT use hardware RAID and is simply a way to create an inexpensive RAIDz that works with the Zevo Community edition software.

I have tried the OWC Mercury which can be setup with RAIDz and Zevo, but upon rebooting the Mac connected to it, then shows up as five separate drives waiting to be formatted. So this product doesn't work.

Thanks!
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Re: JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by hendrst1 » Sat Dec 01, 2012 4:26 pm

I use a SANS DIGITAL TOWERAID TR5m-B eSata only port multiplier; software raid only I believe. I use an internal Firmtek eSata card in my Mac Pro instead of the SANS adapter. Works great with ZEVO so far.
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Re: JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by grahamperrin » Sun Dec 02, 2012 3:13 am

lurch99 wrote:... RAIDz ... but upon rebooting the Mac connected to it, then shows up as five separate drives waiting to be formatted. So this product doesn't work. ...


Related: problem with OWC Mercury Rack Pro
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Re: JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by satadru » Fri Dec 07, 2012 12:43 pm

This DAT Optic sBOX-PTL 5 tray enclosure http://www.datoptic.com/five-tray-less-bay-sii-3726-enclosure.html works pretty well for me.

Image
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Re: JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by mkush » Mon Dec 10, 2012 12:22 am

I use a Sans Digital TowerRAID TR4X+ which is a 4-drive JBOD SAS chassis hooked to an ATTO H680 SAS controller in my Mac Pro. Not the cheapest solution but performance should be good since you avoid the port multiplier. Also the H680 could accommodate two such chassis if desired. Got the ATTO at B&H Photo for $320 and the Sans at Amazon for $230. I use normal SATA drives (Hitachi 4TB).
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Re: JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by ghaskins » Mon Dec 10, 2012 9:11 am

I use a Sans Digital TR8X+ ($399, with SAS cables) and an LSI 9207-8e ($325) w/ the Astek Corp A3DRV-HBA driver ($35). I'm not sure if this exactly qualifies as "inexpensive" but it definitely allows you to connect up to 8 SATA/SAS drives in a JBOD.
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Re: JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by gyurift » Mon Dec 10, 2012 2:41 pm

>>> I use an internal Firmtek eSata card in my Mac Pro instead of the SANS adapter. Works great with ZEVO so far.

Thanks for your support, some new controllers coming up soon ;)
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Re: JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by TomUnderhill » Tue Dec 18, 2012 5:22 pm

Any suggestions on a JBOD-type card for a MacPro 3,1 (early 2008)?

I'm looking for a 6GB/s card with an internal mini-SAS connector (SFF-8087). I'll use a mini-SAS extender cable to route the card into the MacPro's hard drive backplane.

Currently the drive bays are populated with four 3TB drives striped and mirrored.

If the card had a second internal mini-SAS connector and was bootable, I'd attach my boot SSD as well.
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Re: JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by audiophil » Thu Jan 24, 2013 9:04 am

I've mostly tinkered with older hardware; but I can at least say that my configurations worked.

I have tested w/ a SANS digital 8 bay tower; one of the SATA FIS/Port Replicator models w/ two internal port replicator boards. Works fine w/ sonnet tempo pro express34 as host. For some reason I did experience situations that caused kernel panics when mixing HFS, Apple Software RAID and ZEVO ZFS formated volumes on the same FIS switching back pane in the case. Performance for mirror vdevs attached to the same replicator was rather lackluster. Splitting the mirror of a raid-10 between 2 replicators performed roughly as well as having all the drives attached w/out FIS switching to a host controller. RAID-Z felt fairly sluggish by comparison; probably the same issue with the FIS switching board as the bottleneck.

I am also using a highpoint RocketRAID 4320 (raid card w/ an intel IOP) with various drives attached via a Chenbro ck12803 SAS port expander. Runs quite fast. Given my lack of a battery module for my raid card and horror stories about cache incompatibilities, I have the zfs drives added to the raid card as JBOD volumes w/ caching disabled. Works like a charm.
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Re: JBOD or SATA port multiplier recommendations

Post by mk01 » Sun Mar 03, 2013 10:13 pm

colleagues, I'm fighting with market and available solutions how to extend capacity of my macs mini. it has no usb3, no pci slot, so only solution i found (beside fw and usb2 which I consider slow or small boxes (low number of drive bays) with FW) is Thunderbolt adapter to ExpressCard and then ExpressCard eSata card to it. But only the Thunderbolt adapter to ExpressCard is going for 299Euro here in Europe, plus the ExpressCard eSata card. Then I can use standard eSata boxes.

Do I oversee any elegant solution or I'm doomed? My idea is to have box of 4drives at minimum, preferably 6 drives. There are LaCie solutions utilizing Thunderbolt directly, but way too expensive and small (1 - 2 disks and meant as a closed boxed external hdd). And the bigger one scalable again without Thunderbolt, providing 80-90Mb/s via FW800.

As I tmp solution I build a box with linux, 6x2TB drives in 3xmirror. I do 100Mb/s via 1Gb ethernet, but still I would prefer directly attached storage due to the latency.

Matus
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