04-02-2021, 09:40 AM
(03-31-2021, 10:40 PM)MNtinkerer Wrote: I do not have 3.5" HDDs in my NAS case currently. Rather I have (2) 2.5" drives. However, when measuring the 30mm tall heatsink mounted to the RockPro64 board, mounted to the NAS case bottom, it stands ~ 1-15/32" tall (35.71875mm). The bottom of the HDD 3.5" carriage stands ~ 1.75" (44.45mm) from the NAS case bottom. The mount hole for the 3.5" carriage stands ~ 2" (50.8mm) from the NAS case bottom. This leaves a clearance of approximately 9/32" (8.73125mm) between the top of the 30mm tall heatsink and the bottom of the upper carriage portion of the disk drive rack. All of my HDD's have 3/32" or greater indentation on the bottom. As for the top of the HDDs placed in the top carriage, they are flush or slightly above the upper lip of the NAS case, coming in contact with the case lid when closing.
As far as I know, the 30mm tall heatsink is not intended to have a CPU fan, which is 13/32" thick, and would collide with the bottom of the HDD in the lower 3.5" carriage. There is enough room between the lower 2.5" carriage portion of the HDD support rack and the upper 3.5" carriage portion for me to route wires between. One could make their own custom drive rack and squeeze (3) 3.5" drives if they used the lowest profile heatsink with the fan built in as the shield for the rear LAN/Ethernet port shield would be the limiting factor.
I have tested this with WD, Seagate, and an old Maxtor drive. The latter drive being typical of drive dimensions from 15 years ago, and the former being typical of modern HDDs. I will be ordering another NAS case later this week for the purpose of prototyping and modification, and would be happy to post pictures of any configuration you would prefer to see then.
Apparently there is an issue with the Pine64 branded PCIe to SATA 2-port adapter that causes the CPU to "spinlock", I've had the error appear 3 times while attempting to set up RAID1 on a Linux host. My FreeBSD RockPro64 development board is in the premium aluminum case until this weekend when I will receive 2 different PCIe to SATA adapters based on different chipsets. Those boards are supposed to be plug and play ready for FreeBSD.
Thanks for the info. I'd be interested in seeing any of your setups when you have the time. I'll open my case again and re-assess how I've mounted the drives.
I've not had any problems with the PCIe interface causing a spinlock on FreeBSD. I haven't been hammering the disks though. I'll setup some test transfers of large files and see what happens.