I’m new to lemmy. I posted this in one of the big self-hosting forums and it was deleted by the mod. I assume they felt it was off topic.
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This is a hack to add an extra drive bay to a Dell Server. Tried with both PowerEdge R230 and R430.
Replace DVD w/SATA Bay. They make replacements for laptop DVD bays that allow you to put a second sata drive there instead. This replacement part can also drop right in place of the slim DVD bay on a Dell PowerEdge. I’ve seen multiple references to this setup working. This guy’s blog has screenshots of it. https://tachytelic.net/2019/10/install-ssd-optical-13th-generation-poweredge/
I don’t see the disk. At all. The OS doesn’t. PERCCLI doesn’t see it. iDRAC doesn’t. When I got into Lifecycle Controller to manage the disks, It used to see the SATA DVD drive at the end of the list, but now there’s no entry. (On the R230 when I removed the drop-in and put the original DVD back, it went back to normal. The bay is in the R430 right now.)
I’ve got the right bay, it fits. More important, the electrical stuff all matches up. The drive light activates. Got a brand new drive in there. It hasn’t been tested otherwise, but I’d like to think its ok. In the post I’ve linked, it looks like he has his SATA set to ATA, not AHCI, so I tried that, but no change. Poked at it quite a bit. Can’t think of anything else to examine.
Alright … so there’s all the setup. And here’s why I think it doesn’t work. My main disks are all SAS on both machines. R230 PERC H330 - 4 x SAS 7.5k 3.5" spinners R430 PERC H730 mini - 6 x SAS 10.5k 2.5" spinners
I’ve read that you can’t mix SAS and SATA drives. As the DVD seemed to be a normal SATA, I figured I could use that port with a SATA SSD. But maybe not. It’s not worked on either server, and all the gear involved appears to be operational. It’s worked for other people. But every reference I’ve seen to this working seems to be all SATA setups.
Does anybody know for sure?
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Since I first wrote this, I’ve decided to remove all the SAS drives from the machine and test with just this SATA SSD. I’ll do that soon, when I’m ready to tear down the current array.
A final note. Was it worthwhile?
My main enclosure has 8 x 1.2 TB 10k rpm spinners.
SAS, so they are 12gb link speed. Six of them came with the server. Adding two more, and sleds cost me about $120 on Ebay. Assembled in ZFS RAID10. That’s 4 mirror sets striped together in a fairly classic software raid. 4.7 TB final usable space. Its gorgeous watching all those spinners flicker and whir. Zero regrets.
The new solo SSD mounted in the replacement DVD-to-SATA kit connects at SATA III 6gb link speed. The drive was about $180 and the dvd bay drop in was $7. ZFS single disk raid on the drive. I wish it was redundant. 4 TB usable space. There’s a comforting steady blue light on the bezel to indicate that its working.
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When I tested this setup, the results first confused me. The 12gb raid vs the solo 6gb ssd produced nearly identical results. A VM (Proxmox 8.3) mounted on either storage gets read speeds of about 200-250 M. It looks like the SSD has the edge, but spinner performance is erratic enough that it needs more testing. Write speeds on raid are 35 M and ssd is the consistent clear winner at 45 M.
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Was it worth it? Absolutely. Lotta research and testing. Frustration. Knowledge aquisition. Its good to work your brain. I doubled the storage on the server. Repurposed an unused part. Cheap. While the new storage is not redundant, so I don’t want to add it as a ZFS fusion/special vdev, I can carve out a small partition and use it as ARC cache. If an ARC drive defaults, the zpool just picks up and runs, so its a safe bet.