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I did this with a 1U LaCie case I picked up at surplus about 12 years ago. I was running a version of FreeNAS on it with grand visions of having both my media c

I did this with a 1U LaCie case I picked up at surplus about 12 years ago. I was running a version of FreeNAS on it with grand visions of having both my media center storage at hand in the living room and a place for our backups. I did not appreciate how loud rackmount case fans. I found it totally unacceptable, and abandoned the whole thing.

bloopernova 6y ago
Nowadays you'd be able to shove a couple of raspberry pi 4s and a bunch of big HDDs on a rack shelf and get something similar with far less noise.
- znpy 6y ago
  I recently got an HP Microserver Gen8 for that. It's quite quiet, yet it delivers a reasonable amount of power and i/o throughput. I've got one with a 17W-tdp xeon processor though. It's a awesome little machine because it has a lot of enterprise-level management functions (including ILO) yet it's very small and quite cheap to buy (used).
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    I have one as well for 4 yrs now. I like how you get the 4 enclosures for hdds and an internal usb slot for a thumb drive to put the OS on... And even a fifth internal sata slot you can use to add ssd cache to the raid (as long as you use Software RAID with lvm). There is even a second DDR3 non-registered ECC RAM slot so you can get up to 16gb memory. ... But quiet is not how I'd call it. My Synology NAS (718+) is not only more powerful but also requires significantly less cooling. I just hate that I need two ssd's (read&write separately) and need to use the hdd enclosures, so it reduces the potential raid size to an awkward/uneven number: 5... I wouldn't buy the NAS again because of that.
    - robotmay 6y ago
      I'd love to see a 6 bay HP MicroServer. I too have a Gen8 and my only real complaints are: max 16GB of RAM, and only 4 drive bays which sorta limits you to RAID10 as a best compromise. In the newest model they've rotated the bays to be horizontal and made it half the height; but I'd love to see that same idea at the original height with a few more bays. It'd be a cracking little machine that way. My MicroServer has the E3 Xeon (which was a pain to find in the UK, had to buy the chip off eBay in the end) and for a home server it's pretty stellar. I do want something more powerful for a headless workstation though.
      - 411111111111111 6y ago
        You probably want to use raid10 anyway though. Parity raids are dangerous if you don't have a full backup of all data, as recovery stresses all disks, increasing the likelihood of a second and consequently full failure significantly.
        robotmay 6y ago
        I do keep a full off-site backup of all the important stuff at least :) Yeah RAID10 is a bit of an oddity. I definitely think it's the way to go on 4 disk setups, as it has the same failure level as a RAID5 but with significantly faster resilver times (i.e. both can lose any 1 disk and recover). RAID10 could theoretically lose 2 disks and recover so long as they're not in the same mirror pair. After that it starts to feel like a bit more of a gamble though as you _could_ lose all disks in a single mirror on larger arrays. Say with 12 disks and a RAID7 setup (I'm converting from ZFS setups which is what I know :D) compared to RAID10; you could in theory tolerate notably more disk failures (50%) in RAID10, but you could also take 2 failures in the same mirror and immediately lose data. But yeah the resilver times are horrible even when just mirroring two drives on my server, so I'm definitely wary of the stress resilvering a RAID5-7 array will put on the disks. I think my ideal setup would be two servers with RAID10 arrays mirroring each other. Or I suppose with ZFS you could create two RAID10 arrays in the same machine and then make them a mirrored pair. Which would be entertaining, but I have no idea what RAID number that converts into!

bloopernova 6y ago

Nowadays you'd be able to shove a couple of raspberry pi 4s and a bunch of big HDDs on a rack shelf and get something similar with far less noise.

znpy 6y ago
I recently got an HP Microserver Gen8 for that. It's quite quiet, yet it delivers a reasonable amount of power and i/o throughput. I've got one with a 17W-tdp xeon processor though. It's a awesome little machine because it has a lot of enterprise-level management functions (including ILO) yet it's very small and quite cheap to buy (used).
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  I have one as well for 4 yrs now. I like how you get the 4 enclosures for hdds and an internal usb slot for a thumb drive to put the OS on... And even a fifth internal sata slot you can use to add ssd cache to the raid (as long as you use Software RAID with lvm). There is even a second DDR3 non-registered ECC RAM slot so you can get up to 16gb memory. ... But quiet is not how I'd call it. My Synology NAS (718+) is not only more powerful but also requires significantly less cooling. I just hate that I need two ssd's (read&write separately) and need to use the hdd enclosures, so it reduces the potential raid size to an awkward/uneven number: 5... I wouldn't buy the NAS again because of that.
  - robotmay 6y ago
    I'd love to see a 6 bay HP MicroServer. I too have a Gen8 and my only real complaints are: max 16GB of RAM, and only 4 drive bays which sorta limits you to RAID10 as a best compromise. In the newest model they've rotated the bays to be horizontal and made it half the height; but I'd love to see that same idea at the original height with a few more bays. It'd be a cracking little machine that way. My MicroServer has the E3 Xeon (which was a pain to find in the UK, had to buy the chip off eBay in the end) and for a home server it's pretty stellar. I do want something more powerful for a headless workstation though.
    - 411111111111111 6y ago
      You probably want to use raid10 anyway though. Parity raids are dangerous if you don't have a full backup of all data, as recovery stresses all disks, increasing the likelihood of a second and consequently full failure significantly.
      - robotmay 6y ago
        I do keep a full off-site backup of all the important stuff at least :) Yeah RAID10 is a bit of an oddity. I definitely think it's the way to go on 4 disk setups, as it has the same failure level as a RAID5 but with significantly faster resilver times (i.e. both can lose any 1 disk and recover). RAID10 could theoretically lose 2 disks and recover so long as they're not in the same mirror pair. After that it starts to feel like a bit more of a gamble though as you _could_ lose all disks in a single mirror on larger arrays. Say with 12 disks and a RAID7 setup (I'm converting from ZFS setups which is what I know :D) compared to RAID10; you could in theory tolerate notably more disk failures (50%) in RAID10, but you could also take 2 failures in the same mirror and immediately lose data. But yeah the resilver times are horrible even when just mirroring two drives on my server, so I'm definitely wary of the stress resilvering a RAID5-7 array will put on the disks. I think my ideal setup would be two servers with RAID10 arrays mirroring each other. Or I suppose with ZFS you could create two RAID10 arrays in the same machine and then make them a mirrored pair. Which would be entertaining, but I have no idea what RAID number that converts into!