8 drives in Microserver HP Gen8. Is it possible?

[jack78]

Has anyone tried to connect 8 drives do HP Gen8 by additional card MiniSAS to SATA on 88SE9215 chipset? Is it possible?

[sbv3000]

I would imagine that any 'supported' expansion card would work to give you 4 extra sata ports, but there might be power supply problems with the load, unless you used ssd or 2.5 inch drives, and you have to work out how to mount 8 drives in a small space.

[jack78]

I think about this card http://s.aliexpress.com/NnAfqaqY
I want to build external case for the additional drives

Wysłane z mojego Redmi Note 4 przy użyciu Tapatalka

[sbv3000]

That is a nice card, I'm using similar 8 port card with the marvel chipset and they work ok with the mvsas.ko driver module which is included in the 'extended' extra.lzma ramdisk created by @ig-88/@polanskiman.

If you are planning to use an external drive bay then you will need to make sure that the drives spin up correctly before XPE boots so that both internal/external drives are available other wise your raid may crash. You might need some type of 'power relay timer' system that powers on the external bay first for cold boot and last for shutdown.

[jack78]

I think, I will try to use power supply form my HP Gen8. Power supply has 200W, but in the current configuration, system used 54 Watts.
One HDD use about 3 Watts in iddle, and 12 Watts in load. I have enough power reserve.

[sbv3000]

I would check carefully the power supply 'rails' (12v/5v etc) on the 200w psu that it has enough capacity to handle 8 drives and the other system components. For example a WD Red 4 TB has a maximum 12v current of 1.75amps, which is probably the spinup maximum. If you have 8 drives = around 170 watts peak, dropping to say 100w/8.4amps in load. Remember that drives will 'spin up' from hibernation and demand the current, not just at boot.

I have had problems with arrays where the PSU spec 'looked' ok but is couldn't handle the load and the SHR would randomly crash with different drives dropping from the controllers. Once I put a bigger PSU in it was fine.

[jack78]

For now I need only 6 drives. But I must measure total power consumption on a power meter, for sure.If will be to much, then I exchange the PSU.

Edited September 26, 2017 by jack78

[haldi]

I'm using 4x WD Red 6TB. On my Celeron G1610T with 4gb RAM my system uses around 45W Idle

If all the HDD's go into Sleep it's about 26W.

If the HDD's spin up it shows a maximum of 80W, though i cannot say how accurate the measurement device can capture the peak. Migh be even more.

 

[waazdakka]

Hello haldi,

I installed 4 internal and 4 external drives with almost the same card : s.aliexpress.com/NnAfqaqY

 

My problem is my hard drives never enter sleep and have permanently 60W consumption

 

What is your DSM version ?

[haldi]

Oh... If you want a working sleep mode you need to reset DSM and deactivate EVERY package and service.
There are way too many things keeping your HDDs awake. I've given up on that on a Live system.