Storage Rig

xrapidx

xrapidx

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So my previous motherboard I thought I had I accidentally donated to a school (and kept the one with only 3x sata ports)

I'm trying to assemble a budget rig purely for storage - does anyone have any tips on motherboards and sata expansion cards?

I see you get reasonably priced boards with 6 sata ports - and then maybe expand with pci-e sata cards?

I'd ideally like about 16 drives.
 
xrapidx said:
So my previous motherboard I thought I had I accidentally donated to a school (and kept the one with only 3x sata ports)

I'm trying to assemble a budget rig purely for storage - does anyone have any tips on motherboards and sata expansion cards?

I see you get reasonably priced boards with 6 sata ports - and then maybe expand with pci-e sata cards?

I'd ideally like about 16 drives.
Click to expand...

PSU?

I got an MSI that has 4xSATA3 and 2xSATA6. I had this old SATA card that was in an HP server (since dead) and that added another 4 ports. Worked a charm while it was needed.


Sixteen drives - is this a work rig?
 
GreGorGy said:
PSU?

I got an MSI that has 4xSATA3 and 2xSATA6. I had this old SATA card that was in an HP server (since dead) and that added another 4 ports. Worked a charm while it was needed.


Sixteen drives - is this a work rig?
Click to expand...

Just media at home. I currently have 20+ drives all over the place and want to try and consolidate (e.g. I found 7 drives which weren't powered this weekend, checked them and they're all fine)

I have a decent 800w psu I bought a few years back for my media center pc which is now gone.
 
Why not buy a single 8TB drive and consolidate one by one?

Far easier to manage.

16 drives you are asking for a failure problem. You'll need to RAID them and do this and that.... effort. A single 8TB by far a better idea.
 
agentrfr said:
Why not buy a single 8TB drive and consolidate one by one?

Far easier to manage.

16 drives you are asking for a failure problem. You'll need to RAID them and do this and that.... effort. A single 8TB by far a better idea.
Click to expand...

Well - the plan is some sort of fault tolerant setup, and then replace the drives with bigger drives one at a time as I need space?

A single 8TB drive is one point of failure and everything is gone.

Besides, we're talking in excess of 40TB
 
Yeah buy 4 or 5 big drives than trying to keep 500gb's on life support.
 
Majority of the drives are 2TB+...

... looks like its time to hit google.
 
Got any chassis in mind that house 16 drives?

In your other thread I mentioned having a look at ZFS FS.
 
Question is where do you plan to put the NAS box? If it is close to your home entertainment system then you would need something quiet.
I currently use the CoolerMaster HAF932 series of chassis for the following reasons:
  • High airflow for cooling all components
  • Low noise due to large low RPM fans
  • 6 x 5.25 inch external bays which accomodate the ICYDock or CoolMaster 4-in-3 docks
  • 8-10 internal 3.5inch interal bays
  • Accomodates Full ATX mobo
  • Accomodates larger PSU's

I also added a RAID card for 8 drives in RAID10 mode for quick file transfer / backup
It is then all run using FreeNAS without any issues on an old AMD Phenom X6 Crosshair mobo. Naturally you would use another mobo / CPU.

Networking is taken care of by a Netgear GS716T GbE switch for maximum performance.

Yes the mobo and CPU is old but this where I store my critical data now and it is iron clad. OS is running of a 4GB flash drive.

I used it for all my media streaming / storage but have since moved to more power efficient HP MicroServer for streaming / XBMC.
 
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Tx - will be stored in a separate room, so noise is not much of an issue....Write performance isn't a major issue, and read will probably be max two HD streams at a time, so if it can accomodate that, I'l good to go.
 
morkhans said:
I'm all for something ZFS based like NAS4Free, but if you want something with zero effort and have some $$$ to spend, why not look at a Synology unit? They have various sizes and some models support expansion units.

https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/
Click to expand...

Last time I looked into this, they cost more, and don't allow different size drives, so expanding is fairly limited?

Will have a look again though.
 
If youa re looking for easy to manage, consider Windows 8.1. It comes with Storage Spaces which is really easy to manage and very powerful - unless you really prefer Linux.

Your PSU will likely be a problem - all PSUs are likely to be a problem... While larger PSUs have multiple 12v rails, I have yet to come across one with multiple 5v rails (although I haven't looked recently). Usually you can run a max of between 6 and 8 drives before it's overloaded and you run into problems especially with older harddrives.

A lot of people say that the 5v rail shouldn't be an issue and that's the way the PSUs are designed, but I've had problems with 2 PSUs running 6 or more drives before. THe symtoms can be a bit misleading - instability, not powering on always - need to remove power from PSU then re-connect and start, USB drives not powering up, etc.

You will most likely need a 2nd power supply to run that many drives.
 
me_ said:
If youa re looking for easy to manage, consider Windows 8.1. It comes with Storage Spaces which is really easy to manage and very powerful - unless you really prefer Linux.
Click to expand...

ReFS/Storage Spaces from what I have read is nowhere near as good as ZFS.
 
ponder said:
Forgot about that video, here's the update https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfTOYs2ulNI
Click to expand...
So she drops that she's using a Supermicro expansion card but *what* is nowhere (obvious) to be seen. That said, this beastie (AOC-SASLP-MV8 for search hits) seems to be it. This unRAID thread is also worth reading. A cursory check (the Corex pricelist) didn't show that as being available ...who's going to be the one to bring one in and test? ;)

Oh, and the file server box I have here is built on a 5-in-3 Icydock unit. I gotta say the only gripe I ever had with it is depth back into the PC chassis: it won't play nice in a short box. Aside from that the drives never overheated and I can't recall any drive in there ever having a heat problem.
 
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xrapidx said:
Last time I looked into this, they cost more, and don't allow different size drives, so expanding is fairly limited?

Will have a look again though.
Click to expand...

What other raid system other than unraid allows you to mix disk sizes?

You should be able to build arrays out of different collections of drive sizes. Eg 4x2tb and 4x1tb.
 
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