Merge branch 'main' into large-storage-custom-nas

content/blog/2024/large-storage-custom-nas/index.md

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 The drives sit in the grid and the vibration of the disks spinning is dampened by some rubber bands, you can see a couple in the picture.
 
 The drives are hot swappable and plug directly into a PCB, of which there are 9, each controlling 5 drives. The controller cards are actually just SATA port expanders, and in comparison to many port expanders work relatively well. 
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 Nothing amazing, but simple 4 port SATA controllers.
 
 # Comparing drive sizes
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 # Cabling
 
 At this point I realized the cabling would not fit under the platform, so any new location for the drives would either need to be custom with driver chip (like the previous items) or just connectors with drivers elsewhere, but also with the SSDs being smaller (hence shorter) there is now more room to move things upwards, as it turns out about 35mms of room. I then 3d printed a mask, that would allow me to use the nylong screws into the positions in the chassis but also allow me to add additional holes for anything I wanted to attach, so removing the need to match holes but allow me to extend upwards
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 Then if you put it back with heat transfer epoxy, it will stop restarting, but remains incredibly slow!
 
 # Drive Connectors
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 So a completed PCB, it is a very simple design, two locations to power the drives and then pass through connectors for SATA
 
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 At this point, which was quite a bit of work, I realized with much distress, it was slower than a snail, at one point I was getting an underwhelming 10Mb/s !!!
 
 # The current status
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 It is an Intel RES2SV240 RAID card. It is not really a RAID card in this case, but provides 24 ports, of which 4 are inbound and 20 outbound. This card is relatvely good as you can then use SFF8087 cables to SATA ports, keeping the cabling manageable, rather than individual SATA cables
 
 So let's do the maths
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 This is an amazing win so I started the build out as follows
 
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 It is brilliant what could go wrong!
 
 As it turns out ... there is always something!
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 Instead of using the 9 locations for drives I am going for 6. The last 3 I can use for the RES240 cards and allow some space for cabling, air flow and as it turns out some boot space as well.
 
 In this picture you can see 84 drives, but I did mention 72, where did the other 12 come from ? Remember the 3 original controller cards, as it turns out they fit into the remaining PCI slots.
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 To show that it all works under Linux
 
 It does take about 4 minutes to boot though!
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 I need to add in the power pictures and some other things etc
 
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