I Made My Own JBOD Enclosure For CHEAP

Whenever I talk about building a DIY Nas or a home server, the question always comes up of how can I add more drives to a system when I don't have more space, while there are many different options you can use for external

enclosure

s. These can often have some issues or just cost a lot so I decided to go the DIY route if you are looking for a

cheap

but effective drive

enclosure

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There are a few different options, the first and the simplest. It's just to update your cabinet, but may not always be a realistic option. You may already be using a really big cabinet that has room for a ton of drives but you just need to add more or you just may not have the space if you're like me and don't have a server rack there really aren't many great options for enclosures with a lot of drive bays and the ones that do can be quite large and expensive, you can go for an external enclosure like a USB Das or a direct attach storage box or you can also get a

jbod

like this one from qap which uses many SAS connectors instead of USB, but these are quite expensive and although USB Das boxes are usually a little

cheap

er, they also have some drawbacks that I will talk more about here in a moment, the fact that all of these solutions have some drawbacks me led to this video here recently.

I was browsing AliExpress looking for spare parts for another project and found these acrylic hard drive brackets and this gave me the idea to just make my own jbot enclosure now real quick, what the heck is a jbot enclosure? Well,

jbod

just means a bunch of disks. An enclosure that supports jbod would also present all internal disks to the operating system. with a bunch of disks, the operating system would have access to each drive individually and could do whatever it wanted with it. This is in contrast to hardware raid, where a hardware RAID controller would simply present the operating system with one large drive and then drive them all. parody calculations for something like raid five or RAID 10, it seems that the term jbod is often used simply as shorthand to describe racks or enclosures that support jbod, that's how I'll use it for the rest of this video.

I said before that I often get this question about adding more drives when talking about a DIY Nas or a server, often with something like used office PCs, so I decided to test my setup with this Lenovo ThinkStation p310. I actually used this workstation during some videos from quite a while ago that included a proxmox tutorial and I think it's a perfect candidate for this project. It has a 6th generation Intel Zeon that can support up to 64GB of ddr4, perfect for virtualization or a real server. It has a generous amount of PCIe expansion capacity. and even six SATA ports, but now there is only room for two hard drives, if I had a 3D printer, maybe I could print some interesting bracket to add a few more bays between the two existing bays, but like many people, I don't have a 3D printer . at least not yet, there is also the option of using something like this adapter from Icy do to convert the two 5 and 1/4 inch bays into three 3 and 1/2 inch bays to add more hard drives;

However, these adapters can be quite expensive and This would still give us only five drive bays total and actually won't even work with our Lenovo because the 5 and 1/4 inch bays on that system are slightly spaced apart, so so this is where having an external jbot case could be the perfect solution. so I ordered that acrylic mounting kit I saw on Ali Express and it showed up in the mail a couple weeks later. The clear acrylic looks great, but I wanted to match the season a little better, so I gave it a few coats of Black Spray Paint.

I bought the Ten Drive version of this kit, but I'm only going to use 8 for Terby hard drives. However, I thought the Tin Drive kit would give me a little more room for cable management or even allow me to add a couple more hard drives if I really wanted to and plus it was only like a dollar or two more when As I started connecting the hard drives for the first time, I realized that this was going to be a little more complicated than I initially expected. There are no shelves to slide the units into, so you have to be a little more creative when trying to place them all.

Also, the kit comes with screws and these little rubber washers to help with vibrations, but I quickly realized that getting the units The washers between the panels and the units were going to be extremely tedious and if you use the washers and then you need changing a unit, good luck because all the washers will be crushed a little and the width of those two panels is It's going to be a little narrower trying to reinsert a unit with all four washers will be practically impossible, so realistically you'll probably you'll just have to remove one side of the entire case and then replace the drive and then replace all the washers and all the screws, and it was going to be a pretty big pain, so I decided to throw away the washers and just screw the drives on directly, since all the drives I'm using except one are Nas or Enterprise drives.

They should be able to handle the vibrations and I just wasn't that worried about the noise. The kit also comes with these little cross pieces to allow you to mount 80mm fans, but it was a huge pain to keep them in place. a little too short and maybe that was intentional so you could maneuver them into place after screwing them in, but it was a huge pain trying to keep them in place while putting everything together. Initially I thought of just throwing them away and not using them. fans but I figured that wouldn't be as fun so I went ahead and finally got the bottom unit of the top unit and all the fan brackets in place once I was done putting all the other units in was pretty easy once I They were all inside.

First off, everything felt pretty solid, in fact, realistically, the units are what hold this all together and provide the structure and rigidity. Now having a stack of hard drives is great and all, but how do we connect them to our PC? That's where this comes in this is an HBA or hostb adapter from LSI and normally it would be used in a server to connect to an external drive rack using these minias sff 88 connectors now instead of just using normal minisas cables I bought these adapters which have these 888 minisas connectors on one end, but for SATA cables on the other, each of the minisas ports on the HBA can support up to four SATA ports each, so we'll only need to use two of them.

You can also choose a variety of two other ports. hbas will be a half height card so you can put it in a smaller system, but keep in mind that whenever you buy one of these hbas on eBay try to find one that has been updated in that mode, that is what you want for something like trace while I was On that, I also installed this 10gbit Nick that I fixed with some tape a while ago, this is how we will connect our drives to our PC, but how are we going to power them all? Maybe I can get my way. some extensions from the internal power supply to the drives, but honestly, on this Lenovo system I'm not very confident that that power supply can handle eight drives, as well as any other drives we might have in the system, so I decided to use this .

The bronze EVGA 8 plus power supply I have lying around unfortunately only has two SATA cables and while one of them has four SATA power connections the other only has three so I decided to buy two of these for four SATA power splitters and I'm glad I did, they actually left the wiring on the back of the units pretty clean after plugging them all in. I only had two SATA power connectors that I connected to the two cables coming from the power supply now. We might be able to short some pins on our second power supply and then make sure to turn it on before turning on the system, but then we would have to make sure to turn it off manually every time we turn off the system and such.

It would be a little annoying, so I decided to go a little more sophisticated route and use this thing here called adding to power supply. The idea here is that you connect the 24-pin connector of your second power supply here and then any number of other connectors of the main power supply whenever the main PC turns on the add-on to the power supply it immediately also indicates that it is turn on the second power supply, essentially linking the two power supplies, the dock actually has a six pin ATX connector for a graphics card that's not being used so I plugged it in and then connected the 24 pin connection of our second power supply.

Now obviously this setup is very complicated but I wanted to test things out first before cleaning everything up so I connected all the SATA ports added a true N scale SSD to the thinking station and connected the power cables unfortunately, although the power supply for our jbod turned on immediately, it turns out that for some reason the six-pin connector kept the add to power supply signal on Con Fortunately, I changed it to a SATA power connector and there is nothing here okay, that was activated on both power supplies, so our drives are activated right now, this is booting up, we have a post that HBA is initializing fine.

I see it looked like eight. units I think we look good. I had a few of these grub airs which I'm still not too sure about, but after about 30 seconds the system booted into traz with no problems and all eight of our units showed up with the test. of the concept working I decided to organize all the cables a little. I had the idea to store the ad2 power supply and some of the power supply cables inside the PC case. I was hoping to avoid destructive measures and simply slide the cables through. through the bottom PCI slot, but unfortunately there didn't seem to be enough room so I ended up removing this bracket and that gave enough room for the cables to slide in and stay somewhat hidden.

I started using some zip ties to tire out. The cables, but I probably should have waited because right around that time my fans showed up, these showed up a little late because as I mentioned before I originally thought about scrapping the idea of ​​fans completely but decided to order three of these Redux instead 80mm. noctua fans, some black fans could have blended a little better, but i feel like these gray fans give everything a bit of a vibe now realistically. I think because of the open design you probably don't even need fans. this, especially if you're using 5400 RPM drives and you're putting it in a somewhat ventilated space, if you used 7200 RPM drives or if you were putting this in a closet or something, then the fans might be a little more necessary to control and feed. the fans I bought this little Gizmo that allows you to power up to eight fans from a six-pin ATX connector and also adjust the speed.Adding the fans was a pain as I had to remove a bunch of units to access them.

I finally mounted them all and placed the controller inside the bottom of the case after a bit of cable management. I think the whole setup started to look pretty good. I set up all eight drives into a single Z2 vdev raid and then set up my 10GB connection successfully. Performance wasn't great, but that's to be expected with a single raid. The Z2 vdev streaming read performance was pretty solid, although when I read a 20 GB video file I saw around 700 to 800 megab per second and that's with only 16 GB of RAM, so the arc cache didn't help us.

It was completely up to this point when we were writing files to the array, the power supply for the DIY jbod was consuming about 55-60 watts of power, making each of our hard drives consuming about 7 watts of power or so, which is pretty much what you would expect and means that our power supply is not extremely inefficient or any noise actually wasn't that noticeable even without the rubber washers, obviously there was some clicking that would be expected especially with the Enterprise drives, but I did not. I didn't really notice much noise from the vibrations, the system fans and especially the small fan on the Nick 10GB were much more noticeable and the nocta fans were practically inaudible.

Honestly, this weird little DIY jbod seemed to be working pretty well, but was it worth it? It's how it compares to other options. Well, first let's take a look at how much acrylic panels cost. I spent $22 on AliExpress, but just so you know, you can find this same kit for around $24 on Amazon. I spent $47 on the LSI HBA and again you can find them for pretty similar prices on eBay, the mini SAS to SATA adapters were $18 each and even though I had the power supply on hand it probably would have cost me around $30 to buy exactly the same or similar model on eBay.

I also spent $15 to add the power supply, bringing the total cost of the major components of this system to around $150 if I needed to purchase the SATA power splitters or just wanted them for aesthetics, which will cost around another $20. I spent $13. connect each KN to a fan and then $10 for the small controller which brought the total system cost to around $220, although I should note that if you just bought the 8 bay case that only comes with two fan slots , you will save about 10 dollars or so now, if you start looking at 8 bay USB drive enclosures you will notice that many of them are not much more expensive, those enclosures will be much cleaner and look more compact, probably quieter and much easier to replace. drives, but if you start looking on forums and places where people talk about using these Daz enclosures with something like trace, you will find many examples where people have experienced strange interruptions or other connectivity problems due to USB, also many of these units. especially the cheaper ones, they don't always report all the information, like serial numbers for example, in fact I ran into exactly the same problem with this cheap little enclosure for Bay 2 and 1/2, it didn't report the serial numbers correctly to the transfer. meaning you couldn't really use it and most of the more affordable 8 bay enclosures I found will be limited to 5GB per second USB connections when using hard drives which might not be the biggest limitation but we can see it just from In our previous tests it would indeed be a bottleneck, one of the only drives I found that at least seemed to support 10GB per second USB was this one from qap, which costs more than double what we spent on our DIY jbod, now speaking of qap, yes they do.

Make this cool jbot enclosure here that also uses minia connections and a pcie card instead of USB, again it will be much cleaner, more compact, quieter, easier to maintain and won't have any of the bandwidth issues or connectivity, but it costs. almost three times what we spent on our DIY unit. I didn't mention this before, but you can look for racks for used Enterprise drives that would have been used in server racks; However, space requirements and noise can be two factors to consider and with these you will still have to pay for an HBA and for the cables to connect it, obviously our DIY solution is a bit complicated, not very compact and a bit weird, but it works and there's no arguing that with this setup you won't have to deal with the bandwidth limitations or dropout issues of cheaper USB enclosures and it's much cheaper than more sophisticated options, plus if If you ever need to expand, it will also be a lot cheaper because the power supply and HBA were a pretty big part of our initial cost, adding eight more drives wouldn't be that expensive, all you need to do is buy another one of those hardware kits. acrylic mount, a couple more cables and fans if you really need them, for another 80 or $100 or so. it has eight more drive bays to start connecting more drives to, so overall, especially if for example you already have an extra power supply on hand and as long as you don't mind the Jank, this isn't the worst solution What would I choose?

I'd love to know what you think about this strange little enclosure so be sure to leave them in the comments below, maybe let me know what you'd like me to do with this because I was originally planning on just trashing it after this. video but I like it, I want to use it again somehow, so if you have any ideas be sure to put them in the comments below. Also if you like this video and the other videos I make, maybe consider supporting me as a raid. member either here on YouTube or on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month there are a lot of cool perks so it might be worth checking out that's all for this reason so as always a big thanks to everyone to watch, stay curious and I really can't wait to see you on the next one.