For rackmount DAS, look at Dell MD1200 or SC200, or Supermicro 826/836/846/847 JBOD enclosures. For "tower" configurations, there are several options from Sans Digital, iStar USA, Areca, etc. But I think for tower, it is easy enough to build one yourself out of old PC case. Find a PC case with a lot of 5.25" drive bays and get the "mobile rack" enclosures that converts them to 3.5" bays.
It depends on how much bandwidth you need at peak performance. The LSI SAS2308 controller onboard these workstations is a 6Gbps SAS-2 controller, so 4 SAS lanes gives you 24Gbps. However, the way HP has this configured on the motherboard, it is PCIe 3.0 x4 only, and that's about 31Gbps of bandwidth. It's enough for the 24Gbps external connection, but there's also the 4 internal SAS lanes so in total you can have enough devices to push about 6Gbps x 8 = 48Gbps. Although, in reality, I find SSDs (SAS2/SATA-3) max out at around 5Gbps, so you need about 40Gbps, which is still greater than the PCIe3 x4 bus at 31Gbps. For more guidance on this topic, watch this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Q4e8kmuGm6o.html
That is a cool option! It would be interesting to see the rack mount kit to see how well it fits with true rack mount chassis. What other optional parts were there for the Z840?
I don't have the rack mount kit, but I'm curious to see how it fits too. It should convert the Z840 into a 4U server chassis. I have more videos to come on the Z840, specifically more about internal storage options, so stay tuned...
The rackmount kit is expensive as hell. I ended up buying two universal rack mounts for my rack and my Z840s. The PCs lay on top of the mounts and fit quite nicely in the rack. Downside is there is no sliding them out easily to get to the internals.
Not exactly sure if your'e talking about Z800/Z820 or Z840, but I've covered this in several videos. The Z820 being the most troublesome. Checkout the rest of the playlist to find those videos: ru-vid.com/group/PL28eVGz5vFQ-xj9sTJ8WQXq11YDK0Gxe9
My apologies, I have the z820 and will soon get a z840 to practice to practice with. The z820 seems perfect but when I slide in the slotted 4 bay hdd I keep hitting the dram. I will try your method of the 5bay and cut out the small tabs. I have a technique to remove without any debris issues. You've actually inspired me to create a channel tackling similar issues. You are truly a genius at the mods that you do. I've mostly dealt with dell , but will give HP a shot and yes, their cooling is amazing for the cpu and ram slots.
I bought a Z840 because I work on SaaS offerings for my company and I needed a machine that would actually run all the product's microservices, databases, message queues, etc. on one machine and I didn't want to pay a thousand dollars per month for a cloud set up. So far, I've spent about $1,000 (mostly for memory and GPU) on it and obviously it blows the doors off of any laptop I could buy including the latest from apple. It's been a great investment only because of your videos which have shown me to maintain it. First thing I did was follow your NVME video. The unit I got wound up having a bent pin on one of the processor slots, so I had to replace the motherboard. Now I'm just watching your videos to see what I can do with it next. It feels like I bought a sports car and I'm learning how to soup it up, and the documentation is mostly terrible, so honestly, I couldn't do this without you! Thank you!
No, that's not how this works. This expansion option provides you with 4x SAS lanes as external connections. When you connect that to a drive enclosure, the enclosure will often have a SAS expander internally, allowing you to connect to many more drives, but share the 24Gbps (3GBytes/s) bandwidth to the onboard SAS controller. I have a playlist on my channel that goes into SAS expanders and building external drive enclosures; check it out as it might help you understand all the things you can do with these 4x SAS lanes as an external connector.
I started following your channel before adding a r730 to my homelab. I was wondering if you have any suggestions or recommendation for a pcie base ssd solution for a Dell r730. Currently, I use a pair of 2.5 inch SATA ssd drives for my vms. Ideally I would like to continue to use ZFS.
Thanks for watching my channel! The R730 should have an NVMe U.2 option like I've shown for the R820/R720 servers. Look up those videos. The parts are not exactly same, but there are equivalent parts.
