I’m considering purchasing an HL Beast chassis and PSU to replace my failing 15 year old chenbro 48 drive storinator chassis. Does the HL Beast support the 3.5HDDs on their own HBA while the SSDs are on a separate HBA or are the drives wired to a single backplane?
Thank you for your time.
There are two physically separate backplanes and all the drives have a direct path to the HBA(s) or motherboard. There are 4x SFF-8643 connectors on the HDD backplane and 2x SFF-8643 connectors on the SSD backplane. 45Drives hasn’t used expander backplanes in a very long time. When you order the Beast you have a choice of about 7 different cable sets for connecting between the backplanes and your HBA/Mobo included in the price. 1x potential SAS lane goes unused since there are only 15 HDDs.
Now, if you’re thinking of somehow trying to remove the SSD backplane and cramming 48 drives into a Beast, I don’t think that’s going to work. You’d be better off looking for used Supermicro, 45Drives or other high density storage chassis off of eBay. I’ve seen a few older XL60s be listed. Although you’d want to ask the same questions about backplane/wiring architecture.
Thank you for the response. No not going to try to shove 48 drives into the Beast. Im actually downsizing plus I never used all 48 drives in the old system. I like to have separate HBA handling the SSDs for virtualization.
That’s totally possible since the SSD backplane is separate from the HDDs, you would simply connect whichever connector type you chose from the SSD backplane (2 cables) to their own HBA card.
Then the HDDs could go to their own HBA or directly to the motherboard, depending on which cables and configuration you want to go with