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I'd recommend keeping an eye on Craigslist, or unixsurplus.com is also great, but they usually stock newer gear out of that price range. My NAS is a 2U Dell R5
by rhinoceraptor 4y ago
I'd recommend keeping an eye on Craigslist, or unixsurplus.com is also great, but they usually stock newer gear out of that price range.
My NAS is a 2U Dell R510 (Dual E5649, 32gb ECC memory), I think it cost me about $250 on Craigslist, and I've had zero issues. It will likely be difficult to find a machine that can take 10 drives, mine can take 8.
If a machine has 3.5" SAS bays, it likely can take SATA drives as well, but be sure to do your own research. Also, in a lot of these older machines the PCIe card that connects the SAS backplane is hardware RAID only, which means you will have to find a new card, and possibly flash it with a new firmware to enable JBOD mode, so that your disks are passed directly to the host OS. I had to do this for my NAS but it wasn't difficult.
One other tip I highly recommend, you can buy PCIe cards that fit one or two 2.5" SATA SSDs in. I run my TrueNAS off of a mirror of two small SATA SSDs this way, which frees up space for more hard drives in the front.