The ultimate-ultimate NAS.

Better, cheaper, happier.

The other day in my "ultimate NAS" aricle  I actually had a better idea that gives:

• More performance.
• More bandwidth.
• Lower cost

I was looking at the small size of the case of the Lenovo P320 Tiny and wondering if there was not a SFF case that did allow me to add a 'proper' network adapter.

Which led me to the HP Elitedesk 800 G6, it has a tenth gen i5/i7 and the capability to house 128Gbytes of memory (4 slots of 32Gbytes each. It also has 4 PCIe slots (2x x16 and 2x x1) It also has 2x 4xPCIe m.2 storage slots. The x16 slots are x8 and x4 electrically, so enough but not 'great'. It even has 4 native SATA ports (PCH based). It's slots are half-sized though, perfect for the LSI 9400 series and the connectX-3

Then I looked at my choice of storage cabinet and controller again. If you remember, I was advising a 12Gig SAS adapter, but the enclosure was 'only' 6Gig SAS. Turns out there is a follow-up to the MD1200/MD1220/MD3200/MD3240 range of chassis. The MD1400/MD1420 series (there is also a 3000 series which uses the same chassis, just different controllers. There is also an SC420 chasis by DELL/EMC. At the end of the day, these are the same 'steel' and 'backplane'. 

I actually managed to find it cheaper!

Of course, I needed different controllers too, find them _very_ cheap in the US (it was so cheap I had to buy two, otherwise shipping would have been more expensive than the controllers!):

Luckily, the Power Supplies and Caddies (sleds) are still the same as in the old series.

And rather than using a serial port as an admin interface, you can use USB-A to mini-USB interface.

Also, something else that's interesting. Unlike the MD1200 series, this MD1400 (specifically it's controller) can combine the 4 lane 12gSAS cables, so you can run two cables from your controller to your DAS cabinet, which means 96Gbit of storage bandwidth.

The greatest expenditure was two SFF-8644 to SFF-8644 cables:

Luckily, I can still use the SFF-8644 to SFF-8088 to connect further MD1200 and MD1220 enclosures.

But my migration of 3.5" spinning drives to 2.5" SSDs should save me a lot of power. Currently the whole setup is sitting at around 130W, thats with the MD1220, and a completely filled MD1200 (12x 3.5" drives, dual-port SAS 7200rpm versions. I'm hoping to drop at least 60W once all the storage had been migrated and I can disconnect the MD1200.