RN52x RN62x additional sata power

[beisser]

finally the missing parts have arrived.

here is my solution for powering external sata ssds:

so far it works like a charm.

this particular rn526x now has 6xHDD's and 3xSSD's (upgradable to max 6 SSD's, as the additional sata controller has 6 ports).

Might be interesting for other people.

p.s.: this only works if you use something other than readynasos on your rn52x/62x. readynasos wont show the additional drives and will just ignore everything.

@Sandshark what do you think about this solution?

i know its janky, but all is better than not utilizing the true potential of the hardware 🙂

[Sandshark]

I have to wait till a moderator approves the photos before I can see them, but your description sounds good.

FWIW, I believe you could use that configuration in ReadyNASOS.  The GUI won't see the drives in the Volumes or Performance screens, but once you create a volume via SSH, it should see that, and then all the share creation and control functions should work with that volume.  You could even add drives to the existing volume, again using SSH, but I don't recommend that.  Interestingly, RAIDar does see all the drives, and they all show up in the appropriate logs.

I tested this on an RD5200 and RN3200 converted to ReadyNAS OS6.  In the case of the 5200, I just added drives to the otherwise unused SATA ports (it uses SAS only).  On the 3200, I added a card, as my goal was to allow the use of >2TB drives in all bays since 6 of the 12 SATA ports don't support them.  When I added the card, it seemed to "reserve" one of the drive designations for itself, but it otherwise worked doing volume set-up via SSH.  There is a post somewhere in the forum where I discuss doing that, but I don't have a pointer to it.

[beisser]

the pictures just show the 10 port usb powersupply (60w total power), my 3 ssds in a selfmade frame and the usb to sata-power cables running from the powersupply to the disks.

the second picture shows the disks in a pool under truenas.

the disks are then connected to the sata data-cables coming out the back of my nas as seen in previous posts.

it looks a bit messy due to cable lenghts.

especially the red sata cables are a bit long and to inflexible to place them nicely.

will need to think about how to optimize it to make it look nicer.

performance is fine. about 800MB/sec. expected from the 3 old ssds in raidz1 (raid5 equivalent) im using for this experiment.

edit: here is a picture how it looks while installed in my homelab at the moment