Is this reasonable fpr a home lab? I found a few nearby for 500 USD. Supermicro CSE-847-JBOD 4U 45x3.5
Really depends on the size of your home lab.
Do you really need 4 RU of 3.5" drive bays?
SSDs for live data (i.e. VMs) and 4-10TB or more hard drives (for archival) are pretty cheap now.
I mean for 500 bucks it is cheap, but its a lot of power, space and noise to put in your house.
Your money may be better spent on RAM and CPU for de-duplication and compression on SSDs in a home environment (or alternatively, determine how much data you really need).
You can lab up quite a lot of stuff in 2-4 TB of SSD these days; if it’s NVME you really don’t need many drives to get the throughput (like, 1 is enough to saturate the network) - having that many drive bays is for getting speed out of hard drives via fully populating it (pointless these days really) or getting capacity for archive.
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Each drive will idle around 5W (at best), so that’s 225W+ for a full JBOD - close to 500W when active. That’s a lot of power for a 24/7 home lab (considering that you need another machine to access these drives). You’re (edit: the OP is) squarely in the territory of operating costs being a significant factor (no matter how cheap the power in your area is).
If you don’t plan on keeping it on 24/7 you’ll gain the headache of having these drives come online on the accessing machine.
Another thought - this JBOD is a terrible deal if your idea is to keep your stack of 1TB HDDs that you collected over the last 20 years around (or that you find for a steal online). You’d be better served with a (much) smaller number of larger drives that can live directly connected.
The math: operating costs reduced by factor of 10x when using 8-12TB drives (which seem to have optimal $/TB ratio ATM), no need for JBOD capex.
I guess you see me skeptical accepting that a home lab needs 45x 8-12TB or more capacity 
If you really need this much raw storage, maybe this is a small biz operation, at which point the math changes from a cost center to a profit analysis.
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Yeah exactly, that’s the thing.
Its cheap because its massive overkill for a home lab imho, but most businesses won’t run it any more because they’ve moved to flash arrays for live data and want something with full warranty and support for backup/archive. And/or they moved that to the cloud (Glacier or whatever). In other words, its fallen in between niches in terms of usefulness to 99% of people.
So… price is “good”, it’s just a question of whether or not it is “worth it” for home.
As someone who has a bunch of enterprise gear in racks at work - enterprise level or rack mount stuff sounds great if when you see it cheap second hand, but the power, cooling (the heat output of that will be significant too!), noise (rack mount stuff uses small high speed fans for flow through cooling from front of rack to back), etc. just makes it a real pain in the ass at home.
If you don’t have a very specific niche for this, and also plan on running it somewhere far away from your ears, I’d steer clear.
As an aside, if you’re looking to set up a massive home VM lab (which is what I’m thinking if you mention home lab) - be aware, you normally run out of storage IOPs long before you run out of storage capacity (even in the enterprise mostly, at least in a pre-SSD world). Home lab data sets are smaller…
Most new VM admins don’t realise this and get carried away with the storage capacity, but especially with hard drives, its the speed you need, and getting that these days is just easier, cheaper, less heat, etc. with a few m.2 SSDs instead of racks full of spinning drives.
For reference, a (decent) single SATA SSD will outperform a spinning drive in terms of random 4k IOPs (i.e. the sort of workload you see running multiple virtual machines off it) by a factor of 50:1 or thereabouts…
Never mind M.2.
Long story short, unless you’re willing to spend a lot of power, heat mitigation and noise on getting stupid amounts of disk space… don’t. You’d be better off spending money on flash for VM workloads and a small number of very large capacity HDs for archive (which is generally sequential access and not so dependent on high drive count for performance).
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Also… just very briefly browsing eBay…
Fuck that thing.
Lets say you DO want to go to crazy town for home lab spinning drives…
For less money you can get an actual iSCSI SAN (Dell EqualLogic) with a pair of controllers in it which will negate the need for using a PC, SAS controller/expanders/etc. to host that shelf. Just add drives and connect via iSCSI over ethernet.
I used to run PS5000 and PS6000 EqualLogic SANs at work - they’re easy to manage, provide iSCSI targets to clients, etc. You get fully redundant controller modules and PSUs for fault tolerance, etc.
I’d do that instead!
edit:
not sure if that one has 10GbE on it or 1GbE, but iSCSI multi path may mitigate that somewhat for archival/backup storage. Or find one with the 10GbE controllers in it; maybe more expensive than that disk shelf, but you’d save money on SAS controllers, a PC to drive it, etc.
edit:
also worth noting, newer firmware nerfs non-QVL drives
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/uejvhk/dell_equallogic_ps6110_disk_support/
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Except, the listed shelf has 2.5" caddies, which I cannot find use for in a home lab
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You can find them in 3.5" too, or you could put SATA SSDs in it 
I (well, day job) actually still have a pair of (much older) Equallogics I need to rip out of a couple of racks, they’re 16 bay 3.5" models full of 1TB SATA spinning disks.
Positively ancient now though.
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Hmm - I bet they’re connected using a 8 lane PCIe gen3 HBA or RAID card. This whole thing is best replaced with a single 15.36TB nvme
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Yeah, kinda my original point
The progress in SSD capacity vs. cost in the past 5-10 years since we were deploying racks of spinning disk has just been insane.
The drives may be a little more expensive for capacity vs. cost, but you can get the performance in one drive which means all the other ancillary bullshit (with its heat, power and noise) is no longer a thing
edit:
This one has multiple 10GbE:
And yeah again 2.5". Most people went 2.5" some years ago in enterprise for spinning rust to get the spindle density for performance. You can fit more spindles per RU to get better random IO in the same space.
That said, finding drives with the right firmware for those is an exercise for the reader prior to purchase!
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