SATA Beast Data Cold Storage

I setout to find the cheapest way of storing tons of data, I did not need it to be super fast for this was my cold backup, only spun up once a month to write changes than shut down again.

I came across a datacenter only device called a SATABEAST, these are build by NextSan a major storage player in the game, used in massive datacenters.

This device I found on eBay very cheap, and it hold 42 drives!

This is what they look like, sort of dated, but super dense!

Here is how it showed up! Eek! The thing is almost 40lbs empty so I get it, it was missing one Rack ear.. may have fallen out of one of the massive holes in the box. But Lets dig it out and see how it survived.

I can not express how massive this thing is! it is huge and heavy. But looked to have survived the shipment process. Now time to load it with drives.. Wait.. I do not have any of the sleds for the drives.. quick ebay search $500 for the sleds… nope.. lets see if they just fit in the unit with no sleds..

Yup, no problem! They may sit on a slight angle, but I am not worried. The Green lights let me know there is a drive present, and the RED light let me know what drives have problems, how cool!

After setup, I found there was a consistent error.. more on that soon, but ( Fingers in ears ) we need to take care of the sound level first.. wow IS IT LOUD! .. am I yelling? I can not tell haha, wow

Turns out all the noise was from these small fans in the power supplies. Being 1/2 the size of the main front fans they have to run 2x+ the speed to keep up the same air flow.. I had a hunch, 80% of the fan was frame and motor hub.. so I remove the fans completely from both power supplies. and would you know it, the air flow was the same! The screen still yells at me for fan failure, but now it is the sound level of a normal server, or a 747 at takeoff ha. I have ran it this way for some time now with zero thermal problems. Did I mention these are massive 1,200 watt power supplies? yea, they pull some juice!

Now onto the errors.. I was getting a memory error on the controller.. I reached out to NexSan and they said it is soldered on and non fixable…

This is the main board.. I saw socket RAM and went hey, I can replace that, and I did.. same error.. hmm oh wait, that ram is for the RAID Cache.. not the system ram.. that is indeed soldered on.. and bad.. The controller still worked but was not happy about it.. so back to ebay….

Picked up an entire new controller, the unit supports dual controllers, so the old one will serve as a built in backup! I slid it in and configured it and was up and running, no errors!.. oh wait.. Battery failure! ahhh can not win.. turns out the large black pack on the board is a battery backup for the RAID cache.. so I moved it from the bad mem board to the new one and swapped it out, whew.. now I have one fully happy board!

Now to fill it up!

It can hold up to 42 drives, but only have 37 in there at the moment, I just use this as a place to dump all my older smaller capacity drives, for this unit only supports up to 2TB max drive size. This still makes for a great storage pool for cold storage though, I can backup the entire server, and backups to this unit!

It supports hot spares, that live in the unit, and will auto failover to it when there is a problem, this is very handy when using older drives. I have them in RAID5 for it is a backup cold storage. I do not need the speed, just capacity!

If you are one of the few that use my cloud storage service, your data is stored encrypted on this cold backup in the event of a problem with the main array or backup server.