One of the most fun pieces we had from a decade ago at STH was the Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure and Save series. We would look at other DIY solutions like the Supermicro CSE-PTJBOD-CB1 JBOD Power Board for easy DIY JBOD Chassis. Now, we get to see pre-assembled and cool solutions like the AIC J2024-04 JBOF, Giga Computing TO24-JD1 Broadcom SAS4 2OU JBOD, Supermicro options, and more. Still, we came across these development-use Broadcom 8x 2.5″ external SAS4 and NVMe JBOD enclosures and thought our readers would love them.
The Broadcom 8x 2.5in External SAS4 and NVMe JBOD
Here are two units stacked one on top of the other. We can see the eight drive bays in front.
In here, we have Kioxia CM7-V drives. We recently did our Kioxia CM7 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD Review and these are fast drives.
The sides of the chassis are not too exciting, but width wise these are just about the size that one can rack-shelf mount them side-by-side in a 19″ rack.
The rear is where the real magic happens. We get the power input, cabled data connection, fans and a power switch.
The 40mm SanAce fans scream as these are meant for lab use. On the bottom, however, we can see the cabled connections for Slimline SAS x4 (SFF-8654) connections.
Here is what it looks like connecting two boxes to an AMD EPYC server with a single 16-port controller.
Here is the 24G Broadcom SAS4 Tri-Mode RAID controller card (review inbound) in the Supermicro server. We are connecting 16 drives to the 16-port controller.
Naturally, we figured STH readers would want to see what is inside of the boxes.
Here we can see the 300W power supply.
The storage backplane is swappable to other options. Perhaps more interesting is that the Broadcom board is also swappable. We have heard that Broadcom can change the red board in these to handle different types of configurations for not just straight-through connections but also connectivity for things like its SAS expanders/ switches.
While these are fairly nice looking inside, the challenge is that they are not really off-the-shelf components.
Our best guess is that the folks over at SerialCables make these chassis, as we have seen some of their 8-bay JBODs before.
Final Words
While these little boxes seem to be just for Broadcom development, they are super cool. Patrick told me he recently visited a vendor about having these made for sale since it feels like many STH readers might be interested in desktop units like this, assuming they could be made quieter.
Hopefully, our readers liked checking out these little boxes. Stay tuned for the 24G SAS4 Tri-mode review we used them for.
I dont know if they could make these cheaply enough while still running quiet enough to be viable outside a server room for home use… Gen5 NVME sucks so much power, with them all that close together, I’m afraid the little screamers are probably a necessity.
The real shame is that pcie switch chips (not to mention redrivers now with pice4/5) are so dang expensive that theres little likelihood of switched pcie midplanes becoming commoditized. It’d be amazing to get to the point that pcie “expander” back/midplanes were as ubiquitous as typical SAS.
bvd has the pain points identified perfectly for any serious home lab storage platform. Bridging the PCIe-to-SAS backplane without an absurd quantity of 1-to-1 cables plus the heat dissipation problems have made DIY JBODs cost prohibitive as well as unfriendly towards home environments… Even using reclaimed SAS drive bays with their backplanes doesn’t get past the 1-to-1 port mapping problem. I gave up on this little project nearly 10 years ago, but finding a cost-effective SAS (even just SATA at this point) expander might get me back – time to search some more, perhaps?
First question to cross my mind – can I buy this? If this is not for my lab, but for Broadcom’s product development lab – what is the point of this coverage? To tease the poor homelab enthusiast? Anyway, in fact quite educational from the perspective what gear is available to Broadcom engineers.