Id love to build a low cost powerful & fast server i can work off of…were do i even begin? Very open to the second hand market.
Define “low cost”. I could easily suggest a system that’s 1000USD and up, but that’s probably not what you envisioned. Never mind about the budget. We also need to know what your workflow is (or plan to be) and the workload you’ll use it for.
1 Like
1000 usd is definitely low cost. I want a super large drive that can be worked off of. Something i can put in the basment and let be as loud as it wants to be.
You really need to be more specific about performance.
In general if you don’t need it to be really low budget (and you want ECC)
- Asus ProArt X670E-CREATOR (lots of PCIe connectivity otherwise you can go for the cheaper ProArt B650-CREATOR depending on your setup)
- Ryzen 7600 (more PCIe lines than the 8600G), this is overkill “just” for a NAS but it’s about the cheapest AM5 CPUs around but can be handy later on if you want to run background jobs etc.
- https://www.crucial.com/memory/server-ddr5/mtc20c2085s1ec48br (a single 16/32Gbyte stick will likely do just fine), ECC memory is preferred but not required
- A dinky little drive to run FreeBSD 14, TrueNAS (you might run into issues given it’s relatively “new” hardware) or whatever you like/prefer
- Storage backend
- Spinning rust, get “enterprise” HDDs such as Toshiba’s MG-series or Seagate Exos
I think you can probably get decent deals monitoring the datahoarder reddit community
If you need more SATA connections get a HBA or an AHCI-controller later on and/or look at SSDs (SATA or NVME) - Use iSCSI or SMB (Samba) backed with ZFS or whatever you prefer or “bare metal”.
Aquantia 10G NICs can be troublesome in general, you might want to consider using an Intel, Chelsio, Broadcom NIC depending on your infrastructure unless 2.5Gbit is enough.
…or you could by something prebuilt from for example iXsystems
Another option is your run of the mill “NAS” by Asustor, Synology, Qnap etc but you’ll likely miss a lot “nice” features and pay a lot more for “convenience”. Most also lacks ECC memory and are rather “dinky” in terms of hardware but may be enough depending on your requirements.
2 Likes
Where is @wertigon and his suggestion of an all flas storage device, limited in size, and constrained to jus M.2 drives, no SAS, no bulk, no switching drives to main computer…
1 Like
Probably not really relevant to the use case here 
All SSD consumer NAS like the Asustor Flashstor m.2 are great if:
- Your storage requirements are low ( <20TB )
- Your performance requirements are low-moderate (it can do transcoding but more than two streams will break the system)
- You need something cheap and small that does not take a ton of space.
I see at least two things here, storage requirements and performance, that does not fit this bill.
If you already invested in rack infrastructure, then yes, I would go with an all-SSD setup, but I would look towards something more akin to this (note, this is an example):
If that price is too steep for you, then there are cheaper (but jankier) setups. Such as this.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/building-fast-all-ssd-nas-on-budget
With regards to the Flashstor I maintain that, if all you need is a network connected storage unit with 4TB-8TB of storage, the Flashstor 6 slot is pretty hard to beat right now for SOHO. $449 for the base unit and $150-$200 per 4TB drive makes the total cost a really sweet deal, especially as you get six slots and dual 2.5 GbE.
The Flashstor is, however, sensitive to SSD pricing and right now is not a good time to buy SSDs. When SSD prices were at $140 for a 4TB Teamgroup MP34, it was a no-brainer. Right now, it is a much tougher sell. This is a temporary bump mostly caused by shipping disruptions caused by those damn Houti rebels sinking all ships possible in the Red Sea. They will come back soon enough.
On the unlikely event any NAS manufacturers are reading this thread, it seems like there is an opening for a small E1.S or even E1.L DIY non-rackmount home NAS.
I vote for corporate cast offs. Something like HP Z640 (broadwell refresh) or an older proliant microserver could be pretty affordable these days. But there probably aren’t enough bays for you. Dell Poweredge? T630 always looked kind of neat.
My last disk shelf purchase was a SuperMicro 36 bay 4U shelf off Ebay with the quiet PSUs in it. Cost $500 and I just had to add an expander in which I got off Ebay for $40 and then bought replacement fans and a Noctua PWM fan controller from Amazon which cost around $200 for them all. That got the noise to a reasonable level. After tax it was under $1000 and now I have enough expansion room for years to come for adding drives.
So if all you are looking for is a gigantic dumb disk shelf that would be the way to go IMO. If you want it to have some brains and run more like a NAS of its own you can buy used NetApp 15 bay shelfs on Ebay for around $200-300, or if you want a giant one those same 36 bay SuperMicro’s with a motherboard and old Xeon CPU and 128GB RAM are $720 on EBay still. I would plan to add some extra money to the cost of those shelfs for replacement fans, a standalone PWM controller, and a fan splitter though. I used some no name fans, but afterwards found some Arctic S8038-7K that I would use if doing it again. The noise without running replacement fans on low-medium is unbearable for anything outside a dedicated server room.
Given that size of HDDs / SSDs today a fractal design case is probably more than enough 
Disk-Shelf, as in, enclosure that provides power to the disk and a backplane so some server or PC can access the disk via SFF-8088 or similar.
Or NAS, as in storage available on the network.
Recently spotted this, no idea if it is any good:
https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/storage/TS821S/
1 Like
Depends on space, but if you are looking for something on the cheap you could opt for a DIY jbod, like this guy. Only other thing you need is a of to act as your server
2 Likes
It should be great. I have two of the 4 bay versions of that unit for a couple years now and no issues at all. Very stable and cheap.
Define “super large”. And “work off of” meaning as quick/responsive as a local NVMe SSD, or just fast storage for large working files?
And do you have/can you do 10 GBe+ cabling into your basement? (most such servers are very loud, though there are mods).
From my experience (g|G)od-tier shelf for not insane direct cost is an MD3060E. 4U, 5 trays of 12 SAS/SATA love. The only real catch is they run on 230V and, it should be obvious, they don’t sip the power. They’ve also got some gravity to them as it were.
I migrated from 4 Norco DS24E and 6 NetApp DS4246 units. Mix of 4s (been doing this a while), 10s, 12s, 14s, and 18s. The 3060Es are leagues better.
I like used enterprise gear. It tends to be cheap and reliable, if a bit large and/or loud.
I’m running a similar Supermicro SC846 to @EniGmA1987, SQ PSUs, Noctua fan swapped. 18x 8TB drives in a 3x VDEV RAIDZ60 nets me around 80TiB that can saturate a physical 10Gb link with I/O left over for VMs on the virtual interface, and it’s not full yet. Is nice but…
I built this a couple years ago. With 16TB+ drives getting more affordable and Cali electricity prices going the other direction, I’m looking to reduce my spindle count to save power.
If I were building it again today I’d build something similar to what @diizzy suggested because that would meet my needs. It just depends on how much storage capacity you want, and how fast you want it to go.
2 Likes
I have a line on some used lsi disk shelves for basically just shipping cost or if you pass through the area again can just pickup
1 Like
@wendell Interesting. Are these available for the general L1T forum public? Are these 2,5" or 3.5" versions? Other system requirements (power supply voltage)?
what are you looking for and what’s your zip code? mostly what I have is iom3 modules but I have same chassis in ltt video recently and the 2.5" version
Looking for the 3.5" version, I already have 3x NetApp DS2246 chassis + caddies with 2x IOM6 modules each, these are for 2.5" disks. Basically, I want to build me a mini-version of the NetApp rack LTT got for next to nothing as I only have at best 18U rack space available. And that includes networking, head units for the mini-HA cluster (EPYC 7551P+SuperMicro H11SSL based systems in 3U cases) and of course storage. I have a small number (8-10) of 3.5" 16TB HDD’s of various manufacturers that need a home to be accessible. (NAS style)
Where I live, we don’t have ZIP codes. In EU-land we use postal codes, so I’m afraid shipping is gonna be exorbitant. And that’s before EU-Customs are involved 
In any case, if these units are for 110V only, I can’t use them anyway, being in a 240V AC region. Still, thx for looking into this!
PS: I was wondering why there weren’t any SAS SSD’s and within hours you dropped the SAS SSD video over on Floatplane. Very aptly timed Sir! 
Unfortunately, a bit out of my budget, still 
the sas ssd supply has dried up a bit on the used market, too. used to be able to get the 4tb samsung SAS ssds with reasonable life left for around $100 each
3 Likes