I’ve outgrown my first truenas system with 2 simple mirrors for apps and data.
want to build something bigger and better with 8 - 12 drives
as I understand it, my options are:
big tower server with lots of drive bays like a fractal define 5. but then seems painful when it comes to power and cabling as and I will need a SAS hba - or to somehow hack a backplane into the chassis
an external jbod enclosure with a mini sas connector. these seem impossible to find apart from HighPoint Rocket Stor which are £600+
go down the rack server route - but then I’m into unfamiliar territory. can you even build your own rack server with an atx motherboard? won’t I still have the same issues connecting from the server to the disk chasis?
There seems to be an insatiable demand at the moment from pro-sumers. Not sure why the hardware manufacturers aren’t jumping on this. There were some good enclosures ~ 5 years ago but these have all been discontinued.
Any advice appreciated on which way to go. Budget no the most important thing - but scalability and future proofing is.
I ordered this Saggitarius case from AliExpress, still waiting shipment. Based on reviews the hdd temperatures stay real low in this one. It has a well separated dual-chamber layout. I want also to upgrade my game with a bigger case and I found this one very interesting.
It has a nice backplane. One 4 pin molex connector per two disks, so 4 molex power connectors total. I like this, the voltage drop on 12V cables should be low thanks to this.
Build my own server in a 2he server rack with Standard gaming PC components (see my signature). Apart from the psu everything is normal atx size. The 8 front bays are connected via lsi hab. So yes it’s totally possible to build one yourself
Yes, depending on the chassis you use–Supermicro generally are compatible with standard motherboard form factors. So are 45Drives’ units, though I’m personally not a fan. Or you can just buy a pre-built rack server, which is probably your most economical way to go if you buy used (which you should definitely consider). Consider, for example, this unit:
It uses a custom motherboard form factor, which I don’t love, but it gives you 12 hot-swap drive bays, the SAS HBA and expander backplane to handle them, dual redundant PSUs, 10 GbE networking, remote management via IPMI, pretty much everything you’d need. Plenty of RAM, far more CPU than you’re going to need, and expansion slots if you want to put in a GPU.
Any rack chassis you’d want to consider would already include a backplane, probably one with a SAS expander.
Great hardware, but be aware of the large amounts of noise one of those is going to generate if you’re running it at home (or even in an office). Kit like that isn’t designed to be used around humans, those small fans are high speed/high volume.
The 2U systems aren’t as bad in that regard as 1U, but you’re right that they’re still pretty noisy. You can mitigate that a bit with PSU choice though.
Not to mention fiddling drives into position in “storage” mode and the cost of extra trays.
In tower form I largely prefer the Nanoxia DeepSilence 8 Pro. (And long discontinued Lian-LI PC-Q26 well over that…)
If noise is not a major concern, the Node 804 is a good consumer storage case for 8 drives, possibly 10 or 11 with extra fiddling.
Some Intel motherboards still go up to 8 SATA ports; B550 AM4 up to 6.
From 2 HDDs (I suppose) to 8-12 is quite a jump, so consider as far as you want to go and you may well avoid a HBA.
(And the A2SDi-H boards provide 12 ports in mini-ITX. At some cost and limitations.)
For TrueNAS I am currently running a old Fractal Define 5 which is great, but only because we have multiple Define 5 case in production and I was able to get the drive trays from them.
UGREEN is also an option if you want something small NAS like (but without ECC).
Why not just buy a ‘commercial off the shelf’ rack server? In the past few years (at least here,) there has been a proliferation of used commercial servers available on the market relatively cheap, because many companies were moving their IT infrastructure from local servers over to cloud services.
My two HPE DL380 rack servers, each compete with dual Xeon processors, dual power supplies, rack rails, and 12 gb of installed memory (without the drives) cost me less than $500. I thought that was a real bargain for that price. I couldn’t even build one server with those specs for that amount of money.
The Sagittarius is available in this country too for a higher price from NewEgg. With shipping, it comes out to a similar cost as ordering direct with AliExpress. Or there is a similar B10 case that can allegedly hold 10 3.5" HDDs and they even show off their backplanes. If you go back to AliExpress, you can see that it’s similar to Sagittarius in that you have HDDs in the front, a up to ATX motherboard mounted on the ground behind the HDDs and the ATX PSU mounted above the motherboard (see here)
To me, that’s pretty tight and the CPU better not need extensive cooling or the HX will interfere with the ATX PSU above. I am also unimpressed with there not being a wall of fans behind the HDDs. The two fans they do show in the diagram upstream of the HDDs are only cooling 8 out of 10 HDDs. So this is potentially a HDD cooker.
The B10 looks very compact and still supports M-ATX boards. Regarding HDD temps, I’m sure they will be cooking in there, because there is not enough air pressure difference from the rear fans. I mean, the rear case fans will pull air from the side vents and a little bit only from the HDD cage (air resistance). This very same issue prevented me from buying something like the Inter-Tech NAS-8 which otherwise would be my dream NAS case. With some case modding though it actually could work.
The Intertech has a lot going for it, including nice backplanes with activity lights. Not sure those lights will be visible at the front of the case though!
I’m also not a fan of those weird sleds Intertech is using. I much prefer the “open” system used in my Lian Li and the Sagittarius / B10, where just bumper wheels are used. More open space = less static pressure drop = better cooling, all things equal. The Lian Li does one better vs. B10 / Sagittarius by allowing the tower holding the HDD trays to be “locked down” via a simple sliding tab that can be hand-tightened in place via a knurled bolt.
The legendary Q26 from Lian Li has not been in production for the better part of a decade, and I still consider it the best small NAS case bar none. Easily removed panels, up to 10 3.5" HDD and one 2.5" SSD, mini-ITX motherboard and ATX PSU. Excellent cooling with zero issues and a straightforward airflow.
Another vote for the fractal node 804. For 8 or less full sized drives, it works well. Requires a matx board, Asus makes a xeon workstation board that fits but above 4 drives, you’ll need an hba.
Plan it well but also don’t overplan it. By the time you max out that case we may finally see high density nvme drives hit better pricing. For big storage they don’t make sense now but they will at some point.
AsRock Rack E3C246D4U2-2T : 8 SATA (same as Supermicro X11SCH, X12STH, or pretty much any C2x6 board)
…or not. If planning now, I do not think that X11SRM-(V)F or X11SPM-(T(P))F (micro-ATX boards with plenty of PCIe lanes in bifurcatable x16 slots) make sense for a home NAS.
Yeah you got me. I was talking about that asus c246m board I use assuming it didn’t support 8 sata drives. The issue is I used two ports on my mirrored boot drives so I required an 8 port hba for my server.
Regardless, anyone building an 8 drive box with one of these style boards is gonna lose at least one sata to boot and have the same problem with 8 storage drives.
That looks eerily identical to what I made with drive cages from other cases & a left over tower I had from an old build - down to the glass panels that block all airflow & require creative solutions. Drilling holes & bolting in cages looks downright silly when this thing is $90…
Edit: oh, this thing has perforated side panels - this is much less stupid than what I made. Didn’t notice until I actually looked at the listing.
I’m going down a similar path and, judging from what I have seen so far, the answer is a qualified “yes”. One qualification is that ATX-sized 2u and 4u cases tend to be deep-ish: 22” to 26” (560-660mm). Another is that ATX motherboards are often not geared towards low-power systems with proper sleep mode support.
In my situation, I am already regretting the 15u wall-mount rack that can only manage equipment that is 17” (430mm) deep. For expediency (and cost), I’d love to move my old i6700k ATX motherboard from its ancient tower case beneath the rack to a 4u case in the rack; the 17” depth was clearly a poor choice for me.
In a perfect world, I would have a 2u server case and a 2u 4-bay DAS connected via SFF-8088 (such as the QNAP TL-R400S). But one serious downside of this approach is the constraints it puts on server cooling: there is negligible clearance and you can only fit 80mm fans. (Some cases permit larger fans venting upwards but that then constrains what you can install above.) Even though my equipment is in an unfinished basement, I still don’t want unnecessary noise.
I understand now why the 4u HP DL380 and simliar form factor is so popular. But, again, they’re deep.
A deeper floor rack might be an affordable upgrade for me but I really want my equipment well above the floor in order to avoid any flood risk. But I digress…
