Well in an effort to save space and go up to 6gbs environment totally eventually I rebuilt my physical NAS system. I went from having a:
- 4U rack mount case that I booted FreeNAS off
- an Adaptec 39160 SCSI card,
- with a 73gb 10k Seagate ST373207LW SCSI drive
Also in the 4UCase:
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a Dell PERC5e connected to
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an External SGI 3U Omnistor SE301, 16 Bay JBOD Disk Array
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with 3x 2TB 3gbs SAS Drives
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with a Dell PERC H310i 6gbs SAS card
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2 x 2TB 6gbs SAS hard drives internally (in 4u Case)
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Plus 1 x 4tb 6gbs SAS hard drive (in 4u Case)
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The motherboard is an Intel S5000PSL
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2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5345 @ 2.33GHz
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2 x Dynatron H185 Intel Xeon Socket 771
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with 20gb FB DIMMS
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with HP NC7170 PCI-X Dual Gigabit NIC
In my newly built enviornment I have it booting FreeNAS off of a thumb flash drive with the following:
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3U Chenbro RM31616 16-bay Storage server Chassis with 6Gb/s mini SAS
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Dell H310 6gbs SAS card
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3 x 2TB 3gbs SAS drives
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4 x 2tb 6gbs SAS drives
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1 x 1 6gbs SAS drives
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2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5345 @ 2.33GHz
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20GB FB DIMMS
I was able to move the FreeNAS configuration over by saving it to a file on one of my desktop systems and then after it picked up a DHCP address on boot up I uploaded the old configuration and it came up showing my old iSCSI targets to my Virtual environments as well as my NFS shares!
Well this was quite the overhaul! I had to customize and drill some additional holes into some old rails (get new cobalt bit from Home Depot) I have, got some smaller screw heads since this new case was a bit wider, jump over to Fry’s get some cables to take internal fans from 4 pin to 3 pin then get that heavy beast up in the rack and cabled. I also had to take the chassis out to the garage and clean it since i got it used. I also added a couple of 50mm fans at the back of the case in addition to the 4 high volume fans that came with the case
I am happy with the functionality of the new unit and the hot swap capability with the 6gb SAS back-plane I can now make use of a source I have found for some decently priced 6gb\s SAS hard drives. The only complaint I now have is that the noise level has gone up considerably mostly due to the 3 x 400W Power supplies.
