6 ms·

I currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it, which I pool using ZFS. That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB

I currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it, which I pool using ZFS. That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting silly. What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of disks?

boring_twenties 6y ago
Buy a used server from Ebay that has lots of hot-swappable drive bays. Many can be had for $100-200 and work fine.
- j_walter 6y ago
  I did this also. An HP G8 DL380p with 12LFF spots was had for <$250 with plenty of RAM. Add Xpenology and it was like having a Synology NAS for about 1/5 the price. Currently I'm running 8x8TB in RAID6...something that would have required a ~$1200 machine from Synology (at least when I was looking to upgrade).
- heisenzombie 6y ago
  I would like to do this, but am worried about the noise. I've heard servers that sound like jet engines. Is anything I can look for to avoid that?
  - fomine3 6y ago
    If you need 12-15 HDDs, Rosewill's 4U case (I have RSV-L4500) is good for bedroom because it supports 12cmfan. Fractal Design's Define 7 XL is recently released and also looks good if you prefer normal ATX case dimension rather than rackmount. If you need just about 8 or fewer HDDs and don't need hotswap, there's many options like just normal ATX case. If you need silence, Don't get a server case that supports 8cm fan only!
  - j45 6y ago
    Avoid real servers. Intel NUC, and tiny pcs from lenovo, hp, dell etc are perfectly serviceable for this purpose.
    - boring_twenties 6y ago
      AFAIK, none of those support ECC RAM, making them eminently unsuitable for serious storage.
      - j45 6y ago
        ECC ram is definitely a consideration. I've appreciated having it when it was around. The needs of each homelab can be different though. Some homelabs don't need to be that serious from a power/noise/energy cost perspective just to get ECC, unless there is an explicit benefit from it. Making do without ECC can be perfectly possible for some or most portions of a homelab.
      - tuananh 6y ago
        most of the synology units are not using ECC. should we avoid them?
  - j_walter 6y ago
    Do some reasearch. The G8 DL380p I bought sounded fine until I didn't use the built in RAID and opted for software RAID due to the software I wanted to use. Not using that RAID caused the fans to run 100% all the time. I opted to hijack the fan voltage (which was harder than it should be for proprietary fan connectors/sensors) and manually crank down the speed to an acceptable temperature/noise ratio. More than I needed to do if I had just done some research first.
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    I would love to know, actually. Mine are all annoyingly loud, especially the HP. The worst part is that there is no operator control over the fan speed what so fucking ever, and it automatically goes up much more than necessary just because a PCI card has been added or some such (even an HP-branded PCI card). You can probably do a lot better by building a custom one, but that is going to be a lot more expensive. I would love to hear from anyone with experience in this actually, as I'm kind of starting to get fed up with it. Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago. Another annoyance is that they will mostly come with some kind of hardware RAID card that doesn't passthrough raw disks. Often, a completely worthless one that must be replaced. Even if it's a less terrible one, it will require reflashing if you want to use it in JBOD mode (for ZFS or software RAID). All that being said, considering that I paid $140 shipped for this HP server 3 years ago, I'm not sure how much I can complain. Setup was a pain in the ass, but once I got it done, it's been working mostly flawlessly since. The only ongoing pain points for me are the lack of USB3, and the fan noise. (I could add a USB3 PCI card, perhaps, but I'm sure that would increase the fan noise even more!)
    - mike22 6y ago
      > Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago. Newer HPE servers with iLO 5 need any plain browser to access iLO, and for the remote console, give you the choice of HTML5, .Net, or Java. I have a Gen10 Microserver and the HTML5 console works flawlessly in Chrome.
      - boring_twenties 6y ago
        I guess that's a pretty significant improvement, but I still don't understand why a server console needs a web browser at all? Why not just fire up a VNC server and call it a day?
- j45 6y ago
  Your electricity usage footprint might outpace the savings that appear to be the case up front. Separating your storage as an appliance/service (dedicated NAS with low power usage) is worth running a comparison on.
  - m0xte 6y ago
    So much this. I think my energy bill for my single PC as mentioned elsewhere in this thread works out about $70 (equiv) a year. When I had the full whack server rack it was pulling that a month and 99% of the time it was idle.
    - j45 6y ago
      Once you add up multiple devices it can get out of hand. The price/watt ratio is helpful to have something you set, forget and don't notice running in the background.
    - j_walter 6y ago
      This might depend on where you live...my server pulls 180W average with 11 hard drives (10 reg, 1 SSD). That works out to ~$150/yr at my electricity rate of $0.0816/kwh.
      - m0xte 6y ago
        Energy isn’t going to get cheaper and neither is the environmental impact of consuming lots of it.
        j_walter 6y ago
        Running a less efficient server or making a brand new server that consumes raw materials. Same can be said for a 10yr old Honda Civic versus a brand new Tesla. Either way is wasteful...just depends on your viewpoint.
        m0xte 6y ago
SteveNuts 6y ago
Synology is really high quality stuff and will pay for itself in reduced power usage. Any ancient rackmount gear you buy will guzzle electricity
- j45 6y ago
  A Synology or QNAP NAS is a good idea in that it will be an appliance type use, which is a big step from having to build and maintain it yourself, which isn't for everyone.
- j_walter 6y ago
  Their hardware is great, but pricey. Used server can be had for a lot cheaper and you can get the same functionality with Xpenology. Not sure the electricity savings outweighs the upfront hardware costs.
  - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
    > Is Xpenology Stable? > As a person interested using Xpenology you should keep in mind, that this is not an official Synology release. Although it’s based on the official Synology DSM which is the same as whats found on the actual Synology devices, it’s not officially supported by Synology. You could get support from the community for this software, but not from the company itself. Typically once you’re up and running things are very stable without any issues but just know that calling support is not an option when you’re not running on an official Synology device.
    - j_walter 6y ago
      I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but it's been super stable for me. The biggest issues come with the software upgrades and certain configurations may have issues, however the Xpenology forums have massive support and everyone lists how their upgrade experience went across multiple platforms (VM and bare metal). It was worth it for me.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  Also in reduced maintenance and suffering. They are designed to do the things we want. I say get a beefy Synology, maybe a tape drive, and rent whatever else you need in the cloud. Plus a desktop/laptop as you prefer.
dvdbloc 6y ago
"Shuck" all of the drives into a Rosewill 4U chassis, if you dig around you can find them cheap open box on Amazon and sometimes even eBay. They're durable, pretty cheap and come with 8 3.5" bays.
- Teever 6y ago
  Unfortunately those Rosewill 4U cases with 15x 3.5" drive haves have been out of stock since COVID started. I wish I could find an alternative that is as affordable.
OJFord 6y ago
I bought, for about £150-200 iirc, a 4U chassis with 16x 3.5" bays for this reason, reckoning it will always be enough (I won't fill them before the optimal £/TB disk size increases and I can go through upgrading them). It sits in strips of U-spaced punched aluminium, sideways on some quick and dirty shelving I built. That's not crucial except that you probably don't want it on the floor, and if you're going to rack mount it (as opposed to just sitting it on a shelf) the (width) sizing is relatively crucial. It was cheap and easy, (the chassis much more expensive than the shelving/rack - but the value's in the hot swappable bays) think I'd recommend it.
aidenn0 6y ago
Find whatever fits your needs here: https://www.icydock.com/index.php https://www.icydock.com/index.php I've never been unhappy with anything I've bought from them. If you want a lot of 3.5" internal hot-swap drives, you may need to find a case with 5.25" bays, which is getting harder to find.
reincarnate0x14 6y ago
There are a number of PCIE SAS HBAs ,or SAS RAID that you can run in HBA mode, which will handle SAS and or SATA drives with an adapter. Getting 16 drives off a single HBA is totally doable and you don't need the more expensive battery-backed cache models since ZFS is doing the pool work. I personally prefer the QNAP options as those either re-branded or integrated from chipsets that are widely supported in Linux and BSD. There are rackable ATX cases like the Rosewill RSV-L4500 which don't have the enterprise-y niceties but are perfectly service-able and fairly quiet for a dozen disks.
Hasz 6y ago
Dunno how many is a bunch, but I have an HP microserver that's quiet and cheap. They're intended for small offices, and can be picked up refurbished for $250. I have ~12(4x3)TB in mine, in two mirrored vdevs for 6TB usable. Less than $125 for all the (used) HGST drives too.

boring_twenties 6y ago

Buy a used server from Ebay that has lots of hot-swappable drive bays. Many can be had for $100-200 and work fine.

j_walter 6y ago
I did this also. An HP G8 DL380p with 12LFF spots was had for <$250 with plenty of RAM. Add Xpenology and it was like having a Synology NAS for about 1/5 the price. Currently I'm running 8x8TB in RAID6...something that would have required a ~$1200 machine from Synology (at least when I was looking to upgrade).
heisenzombie 6y ago
I would like to do this, but am worried about the noise. I've heard servers that sound like jet engines. Is anything I can look for to avoid that?
- fomine3 6y ago
  If you need 12-15 HDDs, Rosewill's 4U case (I have RSV-L4500) is good for bedroom because it supports 12cmfan. Fractal Design's Define 7 XL is recently released and also looks good if you prefer normal ATX case dimension rather than rackmount. If you need just about 8 or fewer HDDs and don't need hotswap, there's many options like just normal ATX case. If you need silence, Don't get a server case that supports 8cm fan only!
- j45 6y ago
  Avoid real servers. Intel NUC, and tiny pcs from lenovo, hp, dell etc are perfectly serviceable for this purpose.
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    AFAIK, none of those support ECC RAM, making them eminently unsuitable for serious storage.
    - j45 6y ago
      ECC ram is definitely a consideration. I've appreciated having it when it was around. The needs of each homelab can be different though. Some homelabs don't need to be that serious from a power/noise/energy cost perspective just to get ECC, unless there is an explicit benefit from it. Making do without ECC can be perfectly possible for some or most portions of a homelab.
    - tuananh 6y ago
      most of the synology units are not using ECC. should we avoid them?
- j_walter 6y ago
  Do some reasearch. The G8 DL380p I bought sounded fine until I didn't use the built in RAID and opted for software RAID due to the software I wanted to use. Not using that RAID caused the fans to run 100% all the time. I opted to hijack the fan voltage (which was harder than it should be for proprietary fan connectors/sensors) and manually crank down the speed to an acceptable temperature/noise ratio. More than I needed to do if I had just done some research first.
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  I would love to know, actually. Mine are all annoyingly loud, especially the HP. The worst part is that there is no operator control over the fan speed what so fucking ever, and it automatically goes up much more than necessary just because a PCI card has been added or some such (even an HP-branded PCI card). You can probably do a lot better by building a custom one, but that is going to be a lot more expensive. I would love to hear from anyone with experience in this actually, as I'm kind of starting to get fed up with it. Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago. Another annoyance is that they will mostly come with some kind of hardware RAID card that doesn't passthrough raw disks. Often, a completely worthless one that must be replaced. Even if it's a less terrible one, it will require reflashing if you want to use it in JBOD mode (for ZFS or software RAID). All that being said, considering that I paid $140 shipped for this HP server 3 years ago, I'm not sure how much I can complain. Setup was a pain in the ass, but once I got it done, it's been working mostly flawlessly since. The only ongoing pain points for me are the lack of USB3, and the fan noise. (I could add a USB3 PCI card, perhaps, but I'm sure that would increase the fan noise even more!)
  - mike22 6y ago
    > Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago. Newer HPE servers with iLO 5 need any plain browser to access iLO, and for the remote console, give you the choice of HTML5, .Net, or Java. I have a Gen10 Microserver and the HTML5 console works flawlessly in Chrome.
    - boring_twenties 6y ago
      I guess that's a pretty significant improvement, but I still don't understand why a server console needs a web browser at all? Why not just fire up a VNC server and call it a day?
j45 6y ago
Your electricity usage footprint might outpace the savings that appear to be the case up front. Separating your storage as an appliance/service (dedicated NAS with low power usage) is worth running a comparison on.
- m0xte 6y ago
  So much this. I think my energy bill for my single PC as mentioned elsewhere in this thread works out about $70 (equiv) a year. When I had the full whack server rack it was pulling that a month and 99% of the time it was idle.
  - j45 6y ago
    Once you add up multiple devices it can get out of hand. The price/watt ratio is helpful to have something you set, forget and don't notice running in the background.
  - j_walter 6y ago
    This might depend on where you live...my server pulls 180W average with 11 hard drives (10 reg, 1 SSD). That works out to ~$150/yr at my electricity rate of $0.0816/kwh.
    - m0xte 6y ago
      Energy isn’t going to get cheaper and neither is the environmental impact of consuming lots of it.
      - j_walter 6y ago
        Running a less efficient server or making a brand new server that consumes raw materials. Same can be said for a 10yr old Honda Civic versus a brand new Tesla. Either way is wasteful...just depends on your viewpoint.
        m0xte 6y ago

SteveNuts 6y ago

Synology is really high quality stuff and will pay for itself in reduced power usage. Any ancient rackmount gear you buy will guzzle electricity

j45 6y ago
A Synology or QNAP NAS is a good idea in that it will be an appliance type use, which is a big step from having to build and maintain it yourself, which isn't for everyone.
j_walter 6y ago
Their hardware is great, but pricey. Used server can be had for a lot cheaper and you can get the same functionality with Xpenology. Not sure the electricity savings outweighs the upfront hardware costs.
- Tijdreiziger 6y ago
  > Is Xpenology Stable? > As a person interested using Xpenology you should keep in mind, that this is not an official Synology release. Although it’s based on the official Synology DSM which is the same as whats found on the actual Synology devices, it’s not officially supported by Synology. You could get support from the community for this software, but not from the company itself. Typically once you’re up and running things are very stable without any issues but just know that calling support is not an option when you’re not running on an official Synology device.
  - j_walter 6y ago
    I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but it's been super stable for me. The biggest issues come with the software upgrades and certain configurations may have issues, however the Xpenology forums have massive support and everyone lists how their upgrade experience went across multiple platforms (VM and bare metal). It was worth it for me.
lallysingh 6y ago
Also in reduced maintenance and suffering. They are designed to do the things we want. I say get a beefy Synology, maybe a tape drive, and rent whatever else you need in the cloud. Plus a desktop/laptop as you prefer.

dvdbloc 6y ago

"Shuck" all of the drives into a Rosewill 4U chassis, if you dig around you can find them cheap open box on Amazon and sometimes even eBay. They're durable, pretty cheap and come with 8 3.5" bays.

Teever 6y ago
Unfortunately those Rosewill 4U cases with 15x 3.5" drive haves have been out of stock since COVID started. I wish I could find an alternative that is as affordable.

OJFord 6y ago

I bought, for about £150-200 iirc, a 4U chassis with 16x 3.5" bays for this reason, reckoning it will always be enough (I won't fill them before the optimal £/TB disk size increases and I can go through upgrading them). It sits in strips of U-spaced punched aluminium, sideways on some quick and dirty shelving I built. That's not crucial except that you probably don't want it on the floor, and if you're going to rack mount it (as opposed to just sitting it on a shelf) the (width) sizing is relatively crucial. It was cheap and easy, (the chassis much more expensive than the shelving/rack - but the value's in the hot swappable bays) think I'd recommend it.

aidenn0 6y ago

Find whatever fits your needs here: https://www.icydock.com/index.php https://www.icydock.com/index.php I've never been unhappy with anything I've bought from them. If you want a lot of 3.5" internal hot-swap drives, you may need to find a case with 5.25" bays, which is getting harder to find.

reincarnate0x14 6y ago

There are a number of PCIE SAS HBAs ,or SAS RAID that you can run in HBA mode, which will handle SAS and or SATA drives with an adapter. Getting 16 drives off a single HBA is totally doable and you don't need the more expensive battery-backed cache models since ZFS is doing the pool work. I personally prefer the QNAP options as those either re-branded or integrated from chipsets that are widely supported in Linux and BSD. There are rackable ATX cases like the Rosewill RSV-L4500 which don't have the enterprise-y niceties but are perfectly service-able and fairly quiet for a dozen disks.

Hasz 6y ago

Dunno how many is a bunch, but I have an HP microserver that's quiet and cheap. They're intended for small offices, and can be picked up refurbished for $250. I have ~12(4x3)TB in mine, in two mirrored vdevs for 6TB usable. Less than $125 for all the (used) HGST drives too.