In several idf closets from my day jobs of the past, we used these to solve this problem
I have one in my homelab with a patch panel, 1500va ups, and a switch hanging on a piece of plywood screwed into two by fours. This is my “production” network “rack”.
inexpensive and low profile way to throw an enterprise server like the dl380 on the wall
I am absolutely flummoxed by the prices for gear out there at the moment, especially RAM. Whatever aspirations I may have had to upgrade at some point are squashed instantly when I look at what RAM is commanding at the moment, i.e. more than the cost of a motherboard + CPU. Nuts.
An interesting case I ran across was the Aries on Alibaba. 8x 3.5” slots, 4x2.5” and ok room up above, at least at first glance and as long as you are ok with a SFX or smaller PSU. Seemed to have adequate room for fans also.
this looks really interesting, thanks.
would the hdd slots need cages?
any recommendations for an e-atx motherboard? have found a couple of server ones with slim sas connectors but most seem to be atx form factor. looks like e-atx is for the gamers!
many thanks,
Mike
You can use a normal ATX board in that case. In fact it supports ITX/MATX/ATX/EATX.
What’s your budget? What’s your workload?
Ah that’s good, didn’t really smaller motherboard would fit too.
I was looking at eatx workstation boards until I saw the price of DDR5 ECC RAM, and that is if you can find some.
Workload wise, it is about 50tb of data, mostly photos and videos, immich, and a big media library for family sharing. So quite modest I guess.
I’m liking the Silverstone CS383 at the moment. Any views from you guys? Available and expensive but not outrageously.
Thanks all
Do you use apps? VMs?
What sharing protocols?
These older Xeon D-1541 boards are a great value
I like the Silverstone case but the price had me clutching my wallet.
For that kind of cash I’d be hunting down Dell server towers on the used market that actually come with hardware. Anytime you see Dell designations, the R is rack mount and the T is a tower case. One of the more recent, used gently in a data center T’s would be worth investigating. Preferably with ddr3 or ddr4 ecc ram and a lower wattage Xeon chipset, maybe even dual.
I have the Sagittarius, and I highly recommend it, though the new Jonsbo N6 is a direct competitor with a mostly identical layout, but probably a higher price.
The Sagittarius isn’t the prettiest thing, but mine sits in a closet so I don’t care really. The airflow is indeed very good, and doesn’t even require high fan speeds to keep the HDDs cool.
The only thing I don’t like is the lack of drive activity LEDs, a system LED, or a reset button. The last two can be fixed by just adding these (I bought a cable set with reset switch and power/HDD LEDs from AliExpress for about $2; they connect to the standard motherboard header). I just put the LEDs behind the front fan so they’re visible. However, there’s no real way to add per-drive HDD activity indicators, since that requires circuitry on the HDD backplanes.
I still would not trust two 120 mm consumer fans behind a backplane to pull enough air to cool the nine drives (weird number by the way).
Great tip, thanks.
The Dell Towers like D430 have front drive bays which is what I really want.
For the same price as the W790 motherboard I was planning to get, I can get a fully fledged system.
Just not sure about ability to add extra SSDs if the 8 drive bays are full of 3.5inch spinning disks.
More research needed and have cancelled the Silverstone case… for now!
Mike
W790??? I think that W680 or W880 are “too new”, too powerful for a NAS but THAT…
I haven’t used one of these yet, but I like the looks of the AUDHEID K7 or maybe the JONSBO N4 / N5.
T430 maybe. The D430 is an old latitude laptop, but that tower looks ideal for storage. Good looking too.
I’m not a Truenas expert, I built the server I was using from spare parts and second hand drives. That was a i5 with intel server board. I’m just updating to X99 board with a xeon 5 and for the first time 64gb EEC memory. That’s good enough for what I need and I have 28 CPUs or something like that so leave me “playing room” for any VM later.
What I’m saying it you need to build for your needs, I’ve only been using Truenas for a few years but I’m pretty sure a fair few of the builds people say they are building are well over spec. My first server cost me nothing, The update has cost about £150 only.
The Sagittarius only holds 8 drives, not 9 (The new Jonsbo N6 holds 9). You can get higher-speed fans; I have the Arctic P120max fans in mine. I only have the lower 4 bays populated, but the drive temps are in the low 30s.
The backplane on the Sagittarius has rather large cooling holes, much larger I think than the Jonsbo cases.
I would also suggest finding an old Supermicro 2U chassis used on eBay. You should be able to find something in the UK.
Yes, they are noisy (although if you get the “SQ” - superquiet PSUs it isn’t as bad). If you are putting it in a crawlspace as I have done, this isn’t an issue. Also, they will use a bit of power, but my power is relatively cheap where it is located.
The upside is you get really high quality gear, great expansion, etc., all at a really good price. Then you are just buying drives.
This is essentially what I did. I started w/ a 2U chassis w/ an X9 board with 32gb ECC ram in it from UnixSurplus on eBay. Then, about a year ago, I found a local guy selling another 2U chassis w/ an X10 and 128gb ECC ram. I swapped the boards (because my existing chassis had a better drive configuration for my needs) and sold the X9 board in the other chassis for more than I paid.
At some point I will likely look to upgrade to a 3 or 4U chassis from Supermicro to support more drives and build a bigger pool w/ additional vdevs. But what I have works great for me for the time being and I could see myself using it for at least the next 3 years.
To get back to OPs original question for a moment, you have to be more specific here
Is it 8 or 12? Because there is a huge difference between 8 or 12 drives.
8 drives you will find mobos that can handle that without an HBA.
8 drives you will find consumer PSU that can handle that or at least only need one or two sata power splitters.
8 drives you can fit into many consumer cases.
12 drives is a different league.
So if you are fine with only 8 drives, and old spare PSU, an old spare Fractal case plus something like Supermicro A2SDI-8C-HLN4F-B or AsRockRack C3758D4I-4L are IMHO still far superior to server builds. Unless you really have a rack and don’t care about noise.
But of course right now is a bad time because of memory and HDD pricing.
That’s a really good point - especially the PSU part. I’ve had to modify and/or make some custom cables just to get around this; it isn’t in everyone’s comfort zone.
You’re right about the storage / memory crisis. I didn’t realise until recently - thanks to AI everything seems to be 5 times the price I was expecting, and that is if you can get it.
I guess I could stick to 8 drives with:
1 - for boot
2 - mirror for apps
5 - raid array for data
But ideally I wanted an SSD pool for faster data (like my photos for lightroom etc) and a spinny disk pool for slow / archive data.
But I supposed I could add NVME expansion cards or just some 2.5inch SATA SSDs off the motherboard.
Currently looking at a Dell T430 as I’ve found a good supplier in the UK who will customise spec. With an HBA330. A bit power hungry, but will come in at around £1,000 without disks, whereas anything new at the moment that I could build myself with latest specs (e.g. DDR5) would be about 3 or 4 times that.
So this will need to last me for 3 years or so until prices hopefully come down…
Thanks for all the advice guys - really appreciated.
Mike
