Building a NAS

[Valiant]

Finding a nice case for like 20 hard drives is proving difficult if not more spendy than I'd like. But I'm getting back into messed about with wood. So I'd like to build something.


What things do I need do be able to hook up that many drives to a mobo? Which mobo to go for? Any leads on beefy enough PSUs or linkable ones? I'd like to run the HDs in some form of RAID (or unraid) config, probably freeNAS with an SSD cache.

[Beardy]

John Heisz has done it from wood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3ux3Y8Qisc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt1Hz1jzpo4

[pcolbeck]

Blimey Sam that's NetApp FAS2600 territory.

[SoreTween]

On the PSU front I recommend Enermax, all the ones I've used have lasted well and they are quiet.  I've an 800 watt one here waiting to go in my desktop that runs fanless to 55% load.  Not that a quiet PSU is going to make much difference to a box running 20 disks...  Have you considered the noise?  A wooden cased 20 disk home made NAS would be a fine thing to behold and a cool project but I wouldn't want it in my house.

There is a useful PSU calculator on the Enermax site.  Over spec it, PSUs hit their efficiency sweet spot at around 50-60%.

[ScumOfTheRoad]

Hi Sam.
At that level, assuming SATA drives, you wouldn not hook them all up to a motherboard.
You need a RAID card with a fanout cable.
A proper server would have a SAS or SATA backplane, but we are going to ofar here.

In fact for your purpose I would today not go for a hardware RAID card.
I would go for an HBA card without RAID. Then use ZFS to connect the drives into a storage pool.

You will need an LSI card with an external connector.

e-SATA connectors exist but I am extremely unsure if you can fan out on those connectors.

[Kim]

https://www.servercase.co.uk/ do some nice 4U cases.  I used one with 16 hot-swap bays for our home server (though it's only got four disks and a couple of SSDs in it), because it was one of the few rackmount cases I could find that would accept sensibly large fans (and a desktop PSU with a sensibly large fan).  I've just used the appropriate inverse-fanout cable to connect the SAS backplane to the motherboard SATA ports, but there's the option of adding a RAID card if I need to add more disks in future.

Agreed that hardware RAID is best avoided.  It limits your options when things go wrong.

[Valiant]

It's because I have a bunch (24) of 2TB-6TB capacity Sata drives sitting around, my goal is to build a feck off big NAS and share it out for everyone in the building for backup purposes with 1TB quotas. Noise isn't a whole issue as it won't be in the same room and it would be a good thing to find a way for it to spin down/slower when not in use.

Good link on the cases Kim, the SC-4320S looks interesting, dilemma as it might negate the woodwork! I did want to avoid hardware raid.

[vorsprung]

It's because I have a bunch (24) of 2TB-6TB capacity Sata drives sitting around, my goal is to build a feck off big NAS and ..

just because you can doesn't mean you should.  Why not build a Kubernetes cluster instead?

[Valiant]

Cos I had to google that :p

[Afasoas]

Hi Sam.
At that level, assuming SATA drives, you wouldn not hook them all up to a motherboard.
You need a RAID card with a fanout cable.
A proper server would have a SAS or SATA backplane, but we are going to ofar here.

In fact for your purpose I would today not go for a hardware RAID card.
I would go for an HBA card without RAID. Then use ZFS to connect the drives into a storage pool.

You will need an LSI card with an external connector.

e-SATA connectors exist but I am extremely unsure if you can fan out on those connectors.

This.
You need a RAID card that supports HBA pass through exposing the individual disks to the OS. I think some of the older LSI cards have to be re-flashed to do this.

Maybe you can split the drives between two servers and use ZFS snapshots for regular backups?

[ScumOfTheRoad]

Afasoas, you are correct.  I used to do a lot of this in my last job!
LSI have cards which can operate in RAID or 'pass through' mode and can be changed with firmware installation.
sam, when you find a card run the model number past us and we can see if it is a pass-through.

As I also remember though you can use a RAID card and present each drive as a single-member RAID 0.
This is reckoned not to be a great configuration if you are using ZFS from what I read.

[freeflow]

I presume you know about NAS4FRee


https://www.nas4free.org/index.php?id=6