SWEET! Thanks!!
That is one VERY tidy case considering how many cables you have. Very impressive!
1. What case is that? I was thinking about the Cosmos II but would consider others.
It's a Fractal Design XL R2, but I had to modify it by buying an additional drive cage and mounting it to the bottom of the case. I wanted the ability to expand to 16 HDDs + 4 SSDs in the future, and that case was the only one I found that gave me the option.
I actually started a thread a few months ago regarding which case to choose because I used to have a standard mid-tower case that only fit 9 drives. The thread might be helpful to you:
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/cheap-case-for-massive-number-of-hard-drives.197749/
2. It looks like you have two ad-hoc fans on the cards. Mind if I ask which cards need additional cooling?
I'm cooling the main heatsinks on the 9361-4i and the RES2SV240. The cards dissipate about 20W each, and the case doesn't any natural airflow where the cards are located so I was afraid they would overheat. The 9361 does have a temperature sensor accessible through the LSI MegaRAID storage manager.
3. The new 9361 card has a different fan out cable connector - looks like it has a power connection in addition to the 4 sata cables - is that correct?
The 9361 has no external power connector. I think you're referring to the SAS cables. The SAS port is now a miniSAS HD (high density) connector, also known as SFF-8643, which is just a smaller version of the conventional SFF-8087. It's completely backwards compatible with the miniSAS SFF-8087 connectors on expanders and backplanes through cables. I bought a
SFF-8087 to SFF-8643 cable to connect the card to the expander.
The RES2SV240 has a molex power connector on it, which gives you flexibility. You can put the RES2SV240 in a PCIe slot, and it will be powered by the slot, or you can mount the RES2SV240 somewhere else and power it through a molex connector. You don't need the molex power connector when it's in a PCIe slot.
4. Where did you get those sata power connectors? I"ve never seen those before.
I just bought a few of
these, took off the connectors, and reattached them closer together.
5. I think with the intel expander you recommended I could do 2 connectors in (provided I had an 8i card) and 4 connectors out?
I know it's possible, but I am not sure if it would increase bandwidth. I've only seen diagrams use two cables to provide redundancy in case one cable or port fails. I also don't think that if you're using only HDDs that the 24Gb/s uplink would be a bottleneck.