Hey if you still have it, im interested. Cant have too many pods.
Was there any update or is it dead jim?
I just got a storage pod v2/3 locally off facebook marketplace. I’ve been in talks with 45 drives for getting a retrofit 15 drive backplane.
@blitz From what i’m seeing the drive spacing is the same, the pcb is much narrower and mounting holes are different spacing. Looks like the spacing is 1.25” (from top of connector to middle of next connector) between sata connections according to the picture that i got from 45 drives…i confirmed it with one of my boards (Picture with calipers, tape measure on the next post is 45drives)
Seems like it might be a little tricky to get the standoffs to work, but could be doable.
Here’s the picture from 45drives.
I also had a question on “is it worth it”
So the StoragePods have 1 sata split over 5 drives and 2 molex and the 15 drive board uses 4 sata connectors and 4 molex.
So if my math is correct, it would be almost 7% faster/more bandwidth? What kind of real world speed difference would it be? Or is there something else that would make it faster (more sata connectors per 15 drives plus a faster hba card)?
The main benefit moving away from the gen 2 backplanes was that they were running on sata2. So 5 drives would only have 3gb/s to share or ~75MB/s. You also can free up some PCIE slots as you would need 3 HBAs to service the 9 sata port multiplier boards. The “is it worth it” is really up to you and your workload. I found them too slow for what I needed but you might not. My storage pod also only came with 1 PSU and you need, specialish, low profile molex cables/connectors to be able to plug in power to the original backplanes so I had 3 boards I couldn’t power. I reached out to a couple vendors to see if I could get the original connectors but later decided to start this project instead as I was running into speed issues especially during a resilver.
Gotcha. For some reason i thought it was sata3 speeds, but nope…sata2…that would probably make a good bit of difference with the newer backplane.
I’m really only using it for a media server running unraid, so i’d imagine it would only be noticeably slower than sata3 during parity check/rebuilds
See post 10 in the thread.
Even if the connectors are spaced the same (which I’m not convinced they are from your photos), you still may not be able to get them lined up correctly with the metal cage. I mean, the differences may be in mm, but the fitment has to be pretty exact for the drive to slide into the connectors.
I’ll add, while the drive spacing may not be the same you could design a new drive cage for the revised spacing. Since you seem to already have a backplane that may be the most cost effective way forward. It shouldn’t be too difficult, just shop around at a couple places to get the best price, local shops, Send Cut Send, Oshcut or Xometry for example.