Norco 4224 Junk - Switching to SUPERMICRO CSE-846E16-R1200B

Well subject says it all.  Initial purchase of the Norco had a bad backplane. ordered replacement, led's do not work, ordered replacement, one of the drives doesn't work.  Ordered another replacement, they shipped the backplane in a round tube with very little packaging, plastic corners with pull tabs are broken...

Strip off plastic tabs from bad backplane and low and behold another defective drive slot.

I put pc's together all day.  I've not seen so poor QA in a product in quite some time!  I give up, sometimes it just does not make sense to save couple of bucks.

Anyway I've ordered the above case, in my sig i have my current setup.  I ordered some breakout cables because I understand the SM backplane uses individual drive cables.

Will my hardware just fit into the new case?

I have data on about 6 of my 23 drives.  Will I lose any information in the switch.  I have screen shots of the orders / serial numbers to get them into the same order in the SM case.

I have over 400 bluray iso's stored on the array atm.  So many hours to burn those disks, I do not want to lose anything.  If I have to I'll setup another unraid server on a new box to pull data off of the Norco to use after I've gotten the SM up and running.

Thanks for any thoughts.

Tony

Just out of interest - who did you order the Norco from and who shipped your replacement bits?  Curious because I've yet to have an issue, but would like to avoid whoever you dealt with lol.

If you place all the drives in the same order you won't lose any data. Double check all the drive serial numbers when you first start the array. Make sure there in the right place an hit start. You should be just fine.

Good news, I'll figure out where the drives start on the new SM backplane using my spare unraid flash drive.  It will take a week for the new case to arrive, must be much heavier as the Norco came by UPS originally.

I bought the original 4224 from NewEgg.  I called Norco directly and they provided the initial replacements on the BP.  I then bought spare BP's from IPC Direct (via a link provided by Mike at Norco Tech Support)

I have built A LOT of servers using the Norco case and only ever had an issue with one.  A replacement part was sent out and everything was good after that.

I have had two NOrco 4220 cases.  My first one, the backplane began smoking after 6 months of use.  The one I use right now works fine, but one of the LED lights do not work.   

Just to chime in here. Ordered my first norco, was a 4020, and it too had a defective backplane. Took me awhile to figure it was the problem rather than the disks. The tech rep was apathetic and despite my best efforts to have the part shipped through USPS, it arrived via UPS and I was slapped with a $60 brokerage charge for clearing customs into Canada.

Well new case arrived, but I have noticed an issue...

I currently have 3 AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 cards driving 24 3TB hard drives.

I have 6 Norco SFF-8087 cables to the current Norco backplanes.

The Supermicro Backplane has 3 SFF-8087 connectors??  Here is a link to the case http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/846/SC846E16-R1200.cfm

It appears it came with a SAS-846EL1 backplane.

1. So do I have to switch out my raid cards to something different?

2. Did I order the wrong case? /sigh

3. Is there a special cable that I'm missing?

Thanks for any help.

Tony

I expect it must have a SAS expander on the backplane but I can't find docs for it.

EDIT : If you google the Backplane model number then you can see the manual for it and it does have expanders.

I'm not sure what you mean by Expanders...

How would I connect the 3 AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 cards to the backplane on the server?  I only see 3 connectors?

Google it.  I've never used them so I don't feel qualified to offer an explanation of how they might work or what the nuts and bolts are I'm afraid.  Maybe someone with more experience will chime in.

i think that backplane includes a expander: http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/other/BPN-SAS-846EL.pdf

See page 3-4 for connection example. You can hook it up with 1 HBA

I think you need 1 single SFF-8087 - SFF-8087 cable to one port on a AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 (pending this works with a expander)

In the manual of the case itself: http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/chassis/tower/SC846.pdf you can read in pragraph 1-1:

SC846E1 and SC846E2 chassis models support only SATA, SATA2 and SAS1 hard drives. The maximum capacity supported by each of these drives is 2TB. The SC846E1 and SC846E2 models do not support JBOD configurations.

This seems not to be the right case for you..

I would try Supermicro Support...  explain what you are trying to achieve and ask whether it will work.  You are using all Supermicro hardware so hopefully they should be able to tell you if it will work.

Just a word of warning....

Use SuperMicro for support, but I would be VERY careful about ordering any parts from them.  I have only had my credit card info stolen once and just a few days after I gave my credit card info via fax to SuperMicro. 

Followup:  Some people expressed concerns on the backplane...

Purchased a M1015 card and the exact same MB / Memory / CPU as was sitting in my Norco case.  Did not want to dismantle that one, as there were doubts that the new case would work.

Installed the parts, the MB bios was 2.0b.  I flashed the M1015 card as listed in the forum directions.

Next, I installed one of my spare WD 3TB Green drives in the lower left slots, and booted up Unraid.  Everything appears to be ok, unraid recognized the drive!!

I started a preclear cycle on the drive and it is working.  Currently it is writing 0's at 140+mb / sec.  Fastest I have seen so far.  On the AOC-SAS2  cards I would normally preclear in the 80 - 100 or so mb/s range.

I'll let it preclear fully then see what happens.  So far so good.

Moved all 25 drives to the new case this morning.  Made sure to put them in the same order as the drive order in the new case is different.

Started unraid and no errors on boot up, recognized all the drives.  Started the rebuild on the redballed drive and it is working.

Pretty easy switch, hopefully, I do not have to unscrew all those drives again.  Heh that was a chore.

Drives on the Supermicro case snapped in very nicely.  Nothing lose.  Noise level on the case is much higher!  But this is in a back closet.

I only have one of the PS pushed in atm.  I really do not need a hot spare.  So I figured I'd leave it out and only use it if the 1st one failed.

Moved all 25 drives to the new case this morning.  Made sure to put them in the same order as the drive order in the new case is different.

 

Started unraid and no errors on boot up, recognized all the drives.  Started the rebuild on the redballed drive and it is working.

 

Pretty easy switch, hopefully, I do not have to unscrew all those drives again.  Heh that was a chore.

 

Drives on the Supermicro case snapped in very nicely.  Nothing lose.  Noise level on the case is much higher!  But this is in a back closet.

 

I only have one of the PS pushed in atm.  I really do not need a hot spare.  So I figured I'd leave it out and only use it if the 1st one failed.

What data rate did the parity build achieve? How long did it take?

10 hrs to rebuild the drive.  Final speed was 65mb/s

I'm wondering if I put the parity drive directly on the MB if parity would be quicker.  I have the cache drive on the mb and get 125mb/s transfers...

I suspect the single SFF-8087 is limiting speed. It carries  4 * SATA-3(6Gbit/s) = 24Gbps. That's 1Gbps per drive with a 10b8b encoding, resulting in a maximum of 100MByte/s per drive. The backplane is not designed to optimize concurrent access to all drives.