DIY project turning a 12-bay DL180 g6 into a JBOD

Yes, and yes :joy:

I was getting a lot of “false” air before. I had thought to plug the holes in the back but I forgot about the many many other holes that there where all over the chassis, so now there is a lot of duct tape everywhere.

These fans are definitely not the right kind, they are airflow models and I think you are right that higher pressure fans would work better. I mean the space around the drive bays is so limited. When these cases where designed hdd’s where a lot less thick.
The thing is, there is one shop that sells these fans for $1.99 a piece so that was a pretty strong argument for them.

I mean actually the cooling was ok. If ambient is around 20c there is no problem. But with no AC and hot summers my room get’s up to 28C in summer. Also the dust filter I’m using is pretty restrictive.

These ones, the 10A versions
https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005002198806279.html?

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I have also heard that those are indestructible fans, as long as not being used. Also, I hope those come with a gallon of synthetic oil and a working dispensing pump. And of course, a discount for the second row of fans needed right behind your filter, and a third one at the exhaust side. :rofl: :slight_smile:

For me, the cardboard goes really well with the duct tape. I would do a cardboard channel to bridge that backplane to those fans to seal it better.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
Cardboard, plywood, duct tape…somewhere underneath you will find a pc case

there might be two available soon :rofl:

I just got my hands on a 72-bay Supermicro SuperServer 6047R-E1R72L2K
So it might be the end of my loyal coffee table setup

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Was a little home forklift included with it? :slight_smile:

Hey, don’t give up on your coffee table gizmo.

I got Dell sc200 (12 bay) JBOD, and am fighting with HD temps. It has 2x PSU each with 2x 80x80x38mm fans that are really loud. I removed one of those from each PSU, and am working on a script that controls fan speeds based on the HD temps. It looks like having just 2x 80mm fans is rather barely enough to have a good balance between temps and noise (for home, not a garage). Your Supermicro has 72 bays, what is 6x my sc200, so it may need ~6x 80x80mm exhaust area, and it doesn’t look like it has that much. Those PSUs have just 40x40mm fans (maybe also double-stacked) and those are really noisy. Although, maybe there is a fan-row in the middle. (Found an image of inside with 7x 40mm fans with 3x double stacked. that was a different model - 36x)

Maybe once you get it to work, let us know how noisy it is.

Where did you pick it up? Just saw one
SuperMicro 6047R-E1R36N 36x LFF SuperStorage Server W/ X9DRI (theserverstore.com)
They want $699.00

I bought it off a former chia farmer here in holland, it came with a bunch of parts and I think by the time I finish selling those extra bits, the case will pretty much be free.

It comes originally with a double row of 92mm fans in the middle. They are 25W! fans and the noise puts a jet engine to shame, it is utterly ridiculous how much noise they make at full blast :rofl:

Furtunately I took this one over from a former chia farmer, he had already replaced them with 120 arctic fans and added a bunch of 140mm fans to the front. He also replaced the psu’s with the SQ (super quiet) variant that really seem to be quite ok even though they still have 40mm fans.

In any case I only have 32 hdds, so my plan it to fill only half of it so the drives have room to breath.

The thought has occurred to me that if I cut this thing in half, I can fit both pieces into my tiny 16U rack and together with the rest of my stuff that would mean 116 drive bays in a 16U audio rack (only 48cm deep) with even inludes a 4U GPU plotter and a separate farmer.

It would be cool, but i’d have to win a lottery first to fill all those bays :sweat_smile:

Still trying to figure out the best option.

I wish it was haha. I carried it up the stairs after removing everything that was removable and it was still freaking heavy

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When I removed those “extra” fans from those PSUs, they were not that happy about it, and didn’t want to budge with the fans speed. So, I jumped RPM pin from the one still in place to the missing fan pin, and PSU was happy with it (finally a perfectly matched pair :slight_smile: ). This change let me control the fan speed via serial port (cannot do it via SAS interface for some reason but was not really hard looking to see if it is doable). I saw that some people were replacing those fans with Noctuas (what I initially intended to do), but PSUs are really expecting high RPMs, and not seeing those with Noctuas, the unit is on a permanent error condition, so trying to control something or get reliable info may not be possible at that point.

My take is that when you a fan has 25W (same like mines - 50W per PSU just for those 2 stacked fans), that implies not really wattage, but the air volume needed. So, it may be that after adding all those “quiet” (meaning, very low volume) fans may not properly control temps.

At this point (kind of cold outside), my script is keeping the max HD temp at 37C (can set it up to whatever), and fans are running from ~7% (night) to 14-18% (day). That 7% is maybe not quiet enough to sleep next to it but much quieter than the fridge.

I was also thinking about exposing the PWM control pin from those PSUs and passing it over to a few front fans (could be low RPM, as those will not feed RPM back to the PSU). That should quiet it down a bit more.

Actually, all that brings the question what controls the PSU fan speed. It looks to me that in those less expensive boxes that is a temp sensor in the PSU, where in this sc200 it is also the main control unit (as there are no other fans in that JBOD). Maybe your PSU is only responding to internal temps, as you have those extra fans inside. In such a case, trying to deliver a fresh air (bypassing HDs) and even gently forcing the air on the inlet could remove them out of the noise equation (I assume that those are rated by few times the power drawn by HDs - basically based on old SAS 15k RPM drives - as in this sc200 case).

Yes the psu’s are 1280W I believe, and x2. I think the redundant PSU’s will share power when both installed, so that should help further. Also I will only have half the hdd bays filled anyway.
There is no data connection from PSU to MB so they must be on internal temperature control.
Actually it might be better to just run with one PSU to get better efficiency out of it. Farm should be about 250-300W, so 20% of total power. There is a pretty good opening on the inlet side of the PSU, so air should get in that way preventing the 40mm fans from working too hard.

This case does seem to be better in terms of airflow than some others I have seen.
There are actual holes! (much bigger than the few mm slits you get in some other cases) in the backplanes to allow air through and the design of the caddies is very open in the front. Also there is no metal plate horizontally between the bays, so there is some more space between the hdd’s for air to pass through. That has been the issue with those DL180’s. There is just almost no space in between the hdd’s, so very little airflow possible.

The same goes for the bays in my 4U farmer case (Inter-Tech IPC 4U-4408), there is just no space for air and the backplane is near completely closed.

In any case I will find out at some point how the supermicro case does. In summer my room temp can go up as high as 28C and ideally I want to keep hdd temp below 40, with 45 as max.

If the temperatures and noise are good, without the need for too many fans strapped to it. I will mount it to the wall vertically, as that will be a very space efficient option as well as make it easy to work on if needed.

With two low profile HBA cards I can run the whole thing (needs 3 of 6 cables connected to have data connection to all bays), that leaves room for a LP GPU for farming if I decide to go that route. Thinking of getting a 1030 for that purpose.

Noise/temperature balance is definitely the biggest challenge using server equipment outside of a server room.

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@Jacek well first results are very promising.

Got half the front bays populated with disks now. With ambient of around 18C, the hottest of 24 drives is 32C with only 3x 120mm fan running at 100%, still pretty quiet though even at 100%. I think something like 70% fans will be enough and that should get the noise down to very quiet. PSU fan are barely audible.
Totally it could fit 48 hdd’s and still have space between each for air.

So…coffee table is going out the window I’m afraid :sweat_smile:

I’m going to figure out a way to mount this vertically to the wall and get a low profile GPU for farming.

(and get a low profile cooler :rofl:

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Also, just pulled the second PSU, that saves 15W on the wall, that’s more than I expected.

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In my JBOD, I have 2 WD and 10x Seagate. Those WD drives are running ~4C higher than Seagate, so I put them in the lower corners (only 2 sides are facing other heat sources (HDs)). That closed the temp gap by ~1+ C. Also, to test it, I put a low RPM 80mm fan in front of the JBOD (basically sitting on the caddy with the hotter HD drive), and that one WD is around 1C higher than Seagates right now.

Actually, thinking about it right now, I put them in the lower corners, but that may be a good position from heat convection point of view. However, as the air is forced, maybe radiation is a bigger factor, and the top corners are cooler spots.

I guess, your PSUs are quiet, as your case is open, and most likely that fan on the right is mostly getting ambient air to them. Once you close the case, that would be HD heated air, so may be noisier.

Maybe for the GPU you can either get 90 deg raiser, or that PCIe cable and get it mounted parallel to the mobo, so you are not limited by height dimension

As you said, looks like it is going really well. Maybe you have somewhere a link to that JBOD (I couldn’t find it on eBay based on your original description).

It’s this one, although I think the product page has been updated. The one I have has SAS2 backplanes, but it’s the same sku otherwise and same MB as well (I’m not using that mb though, I have my lga 1151 mb in there now.).

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/archive/system/ssg-6047r-e1r72l2k

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My monster I will call him…….frankenjbod…….

I love to tinker and when I get time I will finish it and post more pics. It will have a capacity of 256 3.5 disks when I get it all done with 4 power supplies and I will need 9 sas expanders 8 fanning out from a single expander in a star configuration. I think it is a fun project.

What size disks are you going to use?

I will use combinations that average 10tb per disk.