Anyone recommend a PCI SATA card for my N40L? Or alternative solution?

zfa on 01/09/2013 - 12:38

It had to happen one day, I've filled the 4 bays and optical drive (with an HDD) in my N40L and now need to add some more storage.

I was thinking of getting a SATA controller and adding some more drives internally (I see some folk have put a 4x2.5" enclosure where the optical drive bay is) or maybe I can do something else… can I get some kind of external multiple drive enclosure and just use the existing eSATA connection to make the disks availabe to the N40L? If so how many drives can be added this way?

I guess I'm after either a SATA controller to work with my N40L, or an external unit which holds drives and plugs in the eSATA. Any advice on either would be much appreciated, whether it's a "what I'd do is…" or actual products recommendations (such as a good controller card).

Thanks.

Computing

Comments

  • p1 ama on 01/09/2013 - 15:52

    I guess what you can try is to use an external drive with the eSATA port, but after that you're pretty much stuck with having drives outside the box. You can get a PCIe SATA card, but again, your disks will have to be outside the box. I'd say just get a USB 3 card and a HDD dock. Two of them and you're good for another 4 drives.

    • zfa on 01/09/2013 - 18:17

      I don't want to go USB really, I wouldn't trust building a RAID array on external USB drives. You can fit 4x2.5" drives in the 5.25" bay, a few N40L users have done so, so you don't have to go external to expand above what I already have.

      My options really are external eSATA enclosure of multiple drives, or adding a new SATA card to hook up to the 4x2.5" enclosure. Looking for recommendations on the hardware for either of these options but thanks for your input.

      • p1 ama on 01/09/2013 - 18:36

        4 x 2.5" drives isn't really a good idea, it's just expensive and limiting. The max you can get with 2.5" drives at the moment is 1TB, so you might as well just get a 4TB 3.5" drive. Costs less too.

  • _Bruce_ on 01/09/2013 - 19:50

    I have seen external NAS-like devices that present as a single SATA device. This would address your situation, but I personally don't like them as it takes the RAID and low level device control away from your OS. Just a thought.

    For this reason I try to stick with 4 drives in RAID. Of course if you need more than 12T of storage (4x4T in RAID5) you are in trouble.

    Edit: Or something like this might work for you:
    http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10574

    • zfa on 01/09/2013 - 20:35

      That LaCie thing looks crazy expensive to just add an enclosure for two disks though.

      Is there such a thing as just an enclosure I could stick drives into and hook up to a new internal PCI SATA card (4 ports, say)? Any any recommendations for a PCI SATA card? I feel the same way as you - I don't want yet another layer of abstraction if possible. I'd prefer to somehow get extra SATA available an dsome elegant way to attach them to my NAS.

      • _Bruce_ on 02/09/2013 - 07:22

        The elegant method is Thunderbolt. It works like external PCI Express, so you can have the enclosure show up as just a standard SATA controller.

        Cost is not a strong point in this option though.

    • [Deactivated] on 02/09/2013 - 09:11

      For a while now I've been playing around with something like that on my Ubuntu Server based N40L. No joy so far; the eSATA port only recognizes the first HDD in the external 5 bay eSATA/USB3 box.

      Can anyone comment if Windows as the N40L OS does it any better?

      • _Bruce_ on 02/09/2013 - 09:21

        the external 5 bay eSATA/USB3 box

        What box? Most of these (as discussed) have internal firmware than abstracts the drives and presents them to the OS as a single drive.

        • [Deactivated] on 02/09/2013 - 12:15

          One of these:
          http://www.hornettek.com/hdd-enclosure/3-5-quad-bay-jbod/hor…

          … and my bad, it's 4, not 5, bay.

          It works fine of my other PCs running linux, but not the N40L.

          Thanks

        • _Bruce_ on 02/09/2013 - 12:37

          Yep, looks like a firmware issue. If you have it working on other systems what is the difference with your N40L?

        • [Deactivated] on 02/09/2013 - 14:19

          Hey Bruce,
          After your post I started thinking about the problem. The drives were partioned on linux and formatted ext4.

          Out of curiosity I wiped the partions and reset them to NTFS from a Windows PC.

          Plugged the JBOD box back into N40L, logged in, stoked up Disk Utility and, bingo, there were the drives.

          As always, everything has a solution but explaining it can be even harder.

          I'll keep playing. I have time :)

          Love the N40L, BTW. Best 199 I ever spent.

        • _Bruce_ on 02/09/2013 - 14:32

          My first guess is that the drives had a UEFI partition table… that for some reason your N40L setup didn't like. If the drives are 2T or smaller Windows-ifying them probably removed that and just used the old BIOS table.

        • zfa on 02/09/2013 - 16:43

          So this is pretty much what I was looking for.

          Can I hook this up via the N40L eSATA and my OS will just 'see' 4 new drives? I presently have the internal N40L drives in an mdadm RAID array - could I build a new mdadm array across the drives in this enclosure just as easily?

        • _Bruce_ on 02/09/2013 - 16:57

          Looking into it… maybe.

          It all hinges around this comment:
          "Access 4 hard drives individually (JBOD)"

          JBOD is not a standard, and doesn't really mean much. You can certainly acheive what you want over SAS or USB but… sata? As far as I know there is nothing standardised to do this.

          Also, why build a new array when you can extend?

        • zfa on 02/09/2013 - 18:59

          I'd be happy to extend my existing array if it was possible. Just thought it easier to talk about adding new disks for a new array instead of complicating matters with saying I want to extend an existing array blah, blah, blah. That HornetTek unit above looks great if it'd work.

  • rogue5 on 02/09/2013 - 09:50

    fwiw i've got an n40l with windows 2012 standard, storage pools configured on 4 x 2tb wd green drives (5th drive is for the os)

    write speeds are slow with the software raid 5; this is by design
    though transfer for streaming media works really well

    • _Bruce_ on 02/09/2013 - 10:15

      My software raid 5 gets 360 mbps (sequential write). Given that the individual drives get 225, I'm pretty happy with that.

  • rogue5 on 02/09/2013 - 10:31

    agreed mate, i did have an hp 410 raid card with 512 mb bbwc installed, which was excellent

    i removed it after seeing a number of controller errors, had a spare in the exact same config and had the exact same errors, firmware updates supposed to address the problem didnt help - i suspect that its something in the unsupported interaction between the p410 and the n40l hardware… :(
    (guessing both cards with bbwc would probably work as expected in a proper DL type server!!

  • AvidGamer on 02/09/2013 - 17:09

    Hey there.

    Instead of giving you experience with these ill give a link that I use when clients want me to customise the config for tgem

    http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/HP_MicroServer_N40L_Wiki

  • skyva on 02/09/2013 - 17:23

    You could add another hdd using using a 7 pin esata to sata cable running from the rear esata port. I put a ssd in the space where the optical drive would sit, threaded the esata cable back through a rear port and powered it with a splitter from the optical power cable.
    So that gives me 4 x hdd for storage and 1 OS drive by using a $5 cable. if you get rid of the optical, you can fit another drive. 5 drives at 3-4tb each and an OS drive is a fair bit of data for a large lunchbox.

    I then back up crucial data to a usb drive.

  • yamumma on 03/09/2013 - 10:44

    I got dual bay eSata/USB3 "toaster" dock on the weekend for my N36L:
    http://www.austin.net.au/astone-doc-250e-2bay-usb3e-sata-253…

    Hot swappable with the AHCI enabling firmware hack:
    http://www.avforums.com/forums/networking-nas/1521657-hp-n36…

    Slowly replacing my old 500gb and 1tb drives in my microserver with 3tb drives, the dock is great for turning the old drives into big arse floppies for non critical storage.

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