Precision Fixed Workstations

[newpain01]

Hi everyone!

I am converting my Dell Precision T3610 into a NAS, but since it only has 3 SATA power connectors, I wanted to check how many hard drives and SSDs can I split from those 3 SATA power connectors without running into issues? My power supply is the stock 685W.

Thanks

[Chino de Oro]

The power supply is the least concern as the SATA cable itself has a limit of how much power you can pull from it.  For safety, keep the combine of all 3 ports within 50w. 

Depending on brands and capacity, a hard drive can pull up to 15w and an SSD uses up to 3w.  Seagate has high capacity NAS drives that using low power, you can safely install 5 of IronWolf Pro 20tb and it will take a while to fill them up.

[newpain01]

Thanks for the info.

My plan was to go with 5 x 14TB Seagate Exos hard drives in RAID 6 for the NAS, plus one 4TB hard drive for my video surveillance system, plus I am already running 4 SSDs in RAID for the OS and virtual machines.

It looks like this setup will pull more close to 70w (the exos drives are rated at 10W on spin up and 5W idle).

What are my options, is there any way to split the 24 pin connector to get additional SATA cable? (the 2 black SATA cables are currently split out of the 24 pin connector, as shown below)

[Chino de Oro]

You could, however, tapping from 6pin peg or 10pin from power distribution board would be better option as they already have regulated 5v and 12v for your drives.

For surveillance, I suggest to use hot swap via 5.25" bay. 

[newpain01]

Which pins on the power distribution board? Picture below.

There is this unused POWER_VGA2 connector (I unplugged the wire - yellow-black) it looks like that is only 12V.

[Chino de Oro]

You are correct.  My last tesla cooling mod only required to pull 12v for fans, I forgot that it doesn't have 5v.  I suggest to switch drives to IronWolf Pro as it required max 8w each, so you can pull 6 drives on one extension.  The power cable from 5.25" bay can be extended for the remaining drives. 

Have to thought of where to install all these drives?  On a similar setup, I would add two high capacity 3.5 drives to its designed cages.  I would add another x4 of 2.5 drives to the optical bay using hot swap Icy Dock backplane.  Or a single 3.5 removeable dock.  That way, there is no limit of how many drives because I can hot swap during working to access the project I need.  I would install a SATA SSD via the slim optical cage and use it for OS if I have no need for CD or DVD.  There is also possibility to add a couple of NVMe drives via PCIe slots as well.  These are just idea for you to think about.

[newpain01]

Hey, thanks for the response.

I will install the drives in an HP StorageWorks case in my server rack (pictures below). The T3610 will sit horizontally in the rack, probably above the HP StorageWorks. for ease of access. I have a LSI PCI SAS card in the T3610 and 1m SAS to SATA cables which are enough to route out of the T3610 case and into the StorageWorks, will have to extend the SATA power cable though.

Thanks for the ideas!

I do not like the idea of swapping hard drives, that way you have to keep track on which hard drive a project is and you have no backup if a HDD suddenly dies. I currently have 6 external HDDs with all kinds of data scattered around and it's a pain to find a certain file.

I am building this as a complete NAS solution with 42TB of storage (5 x 14TB HDDs in RAID6 - Raidz2 more specifically because it will be using ZFS under TrueNAS and 2 out of the 5 HDDs will be for redundancy, so when a HDD fails, you just replace it and the data is rebuilt from the parity on the other drives). I will be running this NAS 24/7 and using it to backup all my computers and have centralized storage that I can access from any machine, even outside of my network through VPN. I set up the OS on 2 mirrored enterprise grade SSDs as well, so that should be pretty reliable.

[Chino de Oro]

I could see one of the picture, the other one is not visible to me yet but I get the idea of what you are saying.  With this new info, it changes how I think I would source the powers.  For external arrays setup, there are various options and many can provide power for the drives.  On another note, I think the cache vault and drives temps sensor are concern as well.  Thanks for sharing pictures of your project.

[newpain01]

Not sure why the picture doesn't show up, I can see both. Here is a link with more pictures.

How would you do the power in this case?

I was thinking of adding an external ATX power supply in the HP Storageworks as there is space (that case splits in 2 parts, front part are drives, back part were power supplies with turbine fans shown above, but I split it in half for the pictures), and power the drives through their own supply, but I think that makes things more complicated because I need to manually turn on that power supply to power the drives before I turn on the T3610, I can't think of a better solution to be able to control that other PSU through the T3610.

What do you mean by cache vault? Why would the drive temps sensor be a concern?

I am planning to add the 2 turbine fans (one shown in picture above) behind the HP Storageworks to blow directly in the hard drives and keep them cool.

Happy to share, I am glad you are interested.

[Chino de Oro]

Both pictures are up now.  I was referring to LSI features.  Some have flash kit, battery, and Dell OEM wiring connecting between SAS to motherboard for temperature and fan control.  On certain Precision models, it would throw errors at boot if it detects a disconnection.