[kwlug-disc] OT: SAS cables/controller cards (and Fibrechannel?)

[Paul Nijjar]

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 04:47:45PM -0400, Ron Singh wrote:
> 4 things --
> 
> 1 - can you give some idea of the storage capacity of the arrays? See,
> these arrays are loud as hell, suck a lot of juice($$$ to run) and if >8
> years old, pretty low in capacity. Buying cables/cards to use them as
> storage devices for PCs/servers would not be cost-effective by any stretch.

They are definitely loud and power hungry. The fiberchannel ones have
300GB drives (maybe 10 of them in the array?). The Dell box does not
have drives, but can hold 15. The IBMs are a range. The best one has
24x3TB SATA drives, which we will repurpose if the drive array is no
good. There are also drive arrays populated with 450GB SAS and 1TB
SATA drives.

The main reason I am interested in the arrays (as opposed to just the
drives) is because having 10s of terabytes of storage would be nice
for backups. There is some chance that we could use some RAID10
storage for movie production as well. Fitting that much storage into a
different chassis is a pain. But if I am going to need giant ancient
4U servers/controllers to do this then it becomes less attractive. I
won't know for certain until I experiment, and to experiment I need to
find cables or purchase them.

> 2 - Fibre-stuff, though fast, can be spendy to get up and running as
> cables/cards are not cheap to come by or free for that matter. Most of the
> >8yo FC arrays were along the lines of 2tb-4tb of raw storage that sucks
> some 120w-150w depending on speeds of the HDDs. Those 10KRPM HDDs are
> power-hungry.

Agreed.

> 
> 3 - I have some Intel and 3Ware 9650se-8 ML cards(PCI/e 8087-conn) that can
> be borrowed, I am sure I have the some short(18") 8087-8087 cables in hand
> too.  These are capable of 3Gbps SAS/SATA.

I think I have 8087-8087 cables that I can pull from a dead server,
but I may take you up on one or both offers. 


> 4  - The fact that you have drive arrays in this privacy-aware world is
> surprising. My IT shop regularly get some of this older stuff with the raid
> array scrubbed, but scrubbed poorly since an 8-drive 2.4tb(raw) array takes
> about 4 days to complete a 3-pass DOD-type scrub. We are tasked with
> destroying said array, we do that by drilling the hell out of the drives so
> that the platters become a mess of broken glassy bits.

This is also part of my motivation in doing this project. Some of this
stuff has been kicking around for years. Either we should wipe the
drives and use/sell them, or we should ewaste the lot and free up some
storage space. 

- Paul