I just picked up a used Storinator and I’m trying to figure out my next steps. I can’t seem to find a lot online about the older versions of the Storinators. Is there a nice person here who is willing to give me some direction?
I know the motherboard and CPU are scrap and I’m planning on replacing them. But from what I can see I think I have some work ahead with the HBA and the wiring.
Here is a photo of what I have.
Whether something is “scrap” really depends on your use case. What are the HBAs … Highpoint Rocket of some sort? You may not have to rewire anything, just get some HBAs with SFF-8087 ports supported by modern Linuxes, along with the new mobo if you want/need one. What OS do you wnat to run (Rocky, TrueNAS, Unraid, proxmox, …) and what apps/VMs/containers do you want it to run (eg Plex, a Windows guest, …) if any? Are you going to use it for video editing? Do you have the need and infrastructure for 10GBE (or greater) networking?
I have a 10 year old Q30 that does fine as a simple file server, and if I tun Windows on it, it even recognizes the old HBA. I could be wrong, but I think in the other post here about an old pod, it had already been scuttled, it was not intentionally disassembled and rebuilt.
I get that. That was more of a personal choice. A $30 MB and a $5 CPU(what’s in it right now) aren’t going to do me a lot of good when I’m looking to replace a couple of R720s and an R420. I guess a bit more context would have been good. My main goal was to figure out what pod version I had and see if I needed to go down the route of upgrading the wiring.
The HBA are the RocketRaid 750s. Unfortunately, they are a bit too old to work with my preferred OS Unraid, from what I have read. So I will be looking into new options for those.
The wiring should support 6gbps SAS/SATA drives. So, on the one hand if you have no requirement for 12gbps SAS drives or enterprise 2.5" NVMe SSDs then the wiring should be sufficient (assuming the pod is in basic working condition). On the other hand, the question is, will the card(s) you get to replace the 750s have SFF-8087 ports? That is the question you will need to answer. The thing about the 750s as I recall is that they were a form of expander; each chip supported two of the SFF-8087 ports or something, so that’s why they could support so many drives so cheaply, there was some multiplexing going on. I don’t think there are drop-in replacements that support so many drives on one card.
In the other backblaze thread he apparently used two 9300-16is and two expanders, but that would require you to rewire to cables that terminate at the HBA with SFF-8643 connectors. I think you can get multiple 9201-16is and stay with SFF-8087 HBA connectors.
There are LSI 9305-24is available, so if you did rewire to SFF-8643, you could use two of those instead of 3 or 4 16i cards/expanders. I don’t think there are any LSI 92xx series (SFF-8087) 24i cards.
HI @craft211, I can see the serial number in the picture you uploaded and have looked it up in our system.
Here was the BOM when it left our hands, it was built in 2014 and it’s a Storinator 4.0
As @DigitalGarden mentioned the wiring should be fine to use for modern hardware as you do not need 12Gb/s
Yes, the R750 HighPoint drivers are no longer supported in the newer OS but you could easily pick up some LSI 9201 HBA cards to replace these HBAs which do still work with newer OS like Ubuntu 20 or Rocky8 so there is no need to rewire it.
Simply change the motherboard CPU and HBA cards and you should be all set. Maybe add a 10G NIC
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You got a good one! great find. How much did you pay if you dont mind me asking?
Thank you for sending the BOL over.
Looking at what I’ve got, with the exception of missing to 4tb drives, I don’t think anything on it has changed.
Any chance you or anyone else knows the size of the screws for the lid. I’m missing a couple of them.
Well if you don’t include the going rate for the 4tb drives, I got it for $200
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The screws would be 6-32x1/4in-FlatHead
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