CHEAP File server

LabAnimal

LabAnimal

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Hi guys

OK... I have some old high end hardware thats aging and eats electricity and i'm looking at what cheapy board, chip and ram ideas people can recommend that can run on a lower powered PSU thats good enough to run 24/7 and not make Eskom rich!.

The biggest requirement would be LOTS of SATA3 ports (7 or more)

I don't want to use my existing PC's as they are each 850/900w Corsairs with i7 4790k's with ASUS Maximus VII Formula boards - runs Win11 fine with no TPM2 module installed... and considering that i'm finally buying an XBOX series X... I don't really need them for gaming anymore and it would be a waste of money to run them 24/7 as they are currently...

Buying a NAS server becomes too costly too... Yes, I'd love to get one or two... but... no...

What CHEAP PC parts would you recommend in this case to save on power, can run 24/7, have a stack of SATA3 ports that can drive 10tb+ sized drives...?

Thanks in advance
 
I doubt you'll find something with support for seven SATA drives that's both cheap AND cheap to run. You're probably looking at Synology-level equipment which can become pricey.

There are Microservers out there running more that the stock standard 4x drives. I think even the older N36L's can do up to eight drives with an LSI addon card and a modded BIOS. My N40L runs 4x 3.5" HDD's and 1x 2.5" SSD for the OS.

Fitting three more drives into the chassis would be the bigger challenge. But the actual platform is definitely capable of running up to eight drives with ease. In such a small chassis, heat would also be a consideration.
 
An addendum to the above: I neglected to mention that the HP Microservers (N36-N54L at least) have a USB port on the board itself that you can boot from. So with the modded BIOS, you can get 5 drives working on them out of the box, so to speak. 4x drives in the bays and 1x drive in the cavity where the optical drive would usually sit with your OS running off a USB stick
 
So interestingly I’ve been debating this as my N54L ages and I need to replace it and require a decent processing box.

Energy cost obviously becomes an issue else I’d go for a supermicro 24bay chassis .. I’m stil wondering if this isn’t perhaps the best way.

I’ve looked at synology nas boxes but those (5+ bay) go for 9+k typically 12-15k and 9k ext(another 5bays). Processing is good.. but limited to offerings they have so usual plex, home automation and docker/vm etc. it’s pricey given inflexibility.

Another option is getting a newer box latest gen microserver. These days they have more capable cpus but again.. cost vs flexibility. Cost of a new one is about 9k.

Then I considered how I’m running my box.. ie I am doing software raid, docker, vms etc. what I desperately want is cpu power on tap but really great low power mode and flexible platform.. this leaves you with two options.

1. Intel based solution, Nuc like processing box(3.5k upward pending how you spec it)
2. Arm based solution, currently limited solutions out there..Apple mini while costly gives you a 6-8yr run (n54l of mine is nearly a decade old and running for 7yrs continuous)(costly 13k? upward) only worth it if you doing a lot of other things with it and an Apple fan boi.

Still the issue of disks.. well here I’m considering a 5+ bay usb3 or lightening enclosure and running the software raid over it. These I see go for about 3+k. The advantage here would be tossing your existing disks into it much like you do with synology and managing raid(btw you can get synology software and run it if you want).

Huge limitation in doing it this way is throughput.., you limited to the enclosure connection speed which in this case is usb3 typically. These boxes are usually 200w not sure on idle power draw..

Anyway just what I’ve been thinking and planning as I need to do a switch by end of year or at least have a decent solution in place so n54l dying isn’t traumatic.


Btw n54l has usb2. This is partially why I am considering moving off it.. that and VMware is limited to esxi 6.5? So want to add usb3 but limited by driver support.
 
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Btw I’m not sure on the raid over usb3 enclosure.. I keep looking up info on it but always see comments on speed limits.

It’s often touted as a low cost solution when you don’t want a full nas box and not using hardware raid. Was gonna experiment with a box (Orico one is about 3.5k) and see if it helps.
 
I'm confused:
The biggest requirement would be LOTS of SATA3 ports (7 or more)
that can drive 10tb+ sized drives...?
Click to expand...
So over 70Tb of storage.

I presume you have a great many devices accessing the storage, but you are worried about power consumption of a pc with a single 800W power supply? If you are going to have 20 or 50 or 200 devices accessing the file server, don't you think you would need something designed for this, with RAID redundancy, hot swappable drives (for when a drive dies) and some kind of backup of the data?

If power consumption is that much of an issue, get a 1kva inverter, a couple of batteries and a couple of solar panels. Sorted.
 
LabAnimal said:
I don't want to use my existing PC's as they are each 850/900w Corsairs with i7 4790k's with ASUS Maximus VII Formula boards - runs Win11 fine with no TPM2 module installed... and considering that i'm finally buying an XBOX series X... I don't really need them for gaming anymore and it would be a waste of money to run them 24/7 as they are currently...
Click to expand...

Just rip out the gfx cards, plop in a "T" series core i3 (35w tdp) and your good to go. The pc's should be sipping power then. As others mentioned, just cause the psu says 800/900w doesnt mean it uses that much. ..but if you're extra "tinfoil hat", rip out the psu's, sell them off with the gfx/ "K" cpu's and dump in energy efficient 300w or lower PSU's ... much cheaper solution than buying new machines. You prob will have leftover cash from selling those cpu's
 
I use my 4790K as a file server.
I've downclocked it a bit, popped a few 4tb drives in it, 32Gb memory.
Put in a big chunky heatsink and removed all the fans from the system so it runs passively.
Also got the PSU running in passive mode.
It idles along pulling around 20~25w at the wall, obviously bumping that up a bit when in use.
Running win 10 at the moment, has much better power management than any of the linux flavours.
It's nice because I can use it to run all my VMs and as well.

To me, buying a PI, having a ton of USB HDDs just is too much of a pain to try and save 15w of power. I'm much happier with an x86 environment in a single self-contained system than having a drawer of USB things and adapters.
 
My 8disk i3 machine chugs along at ~100w,has a juicy 750watt supply to handle those bursty periods
 
Faux_Grey said:
I use my 4790K as a file server.
I've downclocked it a bit, popped a few 4tb drives in it, 32Gb memory.
Put in a big chunky heatsink and removed all the fans from the system so it runs passively.
Also got the PSU running in passive mode.
It idles along pulling around 20~25w at the wall, obviously bumping that up a bit when in use.
Running win 10 at the moment, has much better power management than any of the linux flavours.
It's nice because I can use it to run all my VMs and as well.

To me, buying a PI, having a ton of USB HDDs just is too much of a pain to try and save 15w of power. I'm much happier with an x86 environment in a single self-contained system than having a drawer of USB things and adapters.
Click to expand...


Are the Raid over USB solutions stable..? I see they say nope on ARSTechnica https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1141150

granted this is 2001..

meh.. guess a new micro server or synology is the way to go then.
 
krycor said:
Are the Raid over USB solutions stable..? I see they say nope on ARSTechnica https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1141150

granted this is 2001..

meh.. guess a new micro server or synology is the way to go then.
Click to expand...
Hardware RAID is *so* 2010.
Software defined storage generally gives you better storage ratios & less hardware requirement.
As far as my system goes, It's 8x SATA on the motherboard, an M.2 boot & you can easily drop in a SATA Pcie card to add more slots if you need to.
Microsoft storage spaces isnt bad at all.

But fair enough, if all you want is a small backup thing, raspberry PI with a USB raid enclosure, or 2 USB drives software replicated can work just fine.
 
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