Building a new computer and recycling an old server body. The old server is a Dell T7500 with 48gb ram and two 6 core Xeons. Turning it into a file server but wondering how to jam all the hard drives I just was given. It has four 2tb drives in it and just got 19 more and a 3TB and six 1TB drives. So 30 drives to build a file server… I know I can’t cram them all in the T7500 so reaching out for advice of a solution.
Thanks in advance and you guys were awesome on my last question.
That many drives, you want a disk shelf. Netapp, Storedge, HP D series, etc. or one of those storinator-type chassis.
Definitely no money for something like a storagenator. I will look up the others. Thanks. Couldn’t think of any of those names off the top of my head.
Last time I did this it was with SCSI drives in 1999. I just modded the hell out of a case to sit next to my main case with side panels open. But don’t want that janky. LoL
Any solution will require some contribution $$$… disk shelf and card or large rack or tower case. Only with this amount vibration can start to kill hdd quite quickly.
Remember to keep some disks out for cold spares and backup. If using raidz2 or raid6 you want all drives the same size so maybe use 24 drives in a netapp shelf and keep the 1TiB drives in external caddies.
You can pick up a 24 bay NetApp DS4246 for $250.
These are all enterprises sata drives. Probably stopping at 20 due to vibrations. Wish I had Linus’s connections lol
That is more what I am thinking. With the DS4246 do I need one or two controller cards?
Okay have all the stuff on the way and when I get out of quarantine and get home I will be able to start this project. Now… Unraid or freenas?
With that many disks I’d recommend zfs. Three 6 disk Raidz2 vdevs and some hotspares would be a nice setup.
Depends on the specific model and cards. Check the listing before you buy but I’d suspect at least a dual port.
Looking at Unraid with ZFS.
Got a dual port card
Have a NetApp DS4486 on the way. It is in the same family as the DS4246 from what I can see but is 48 drives and only SATA. Works for me. I will fill out half with the bulk 2tb I have and over the next few months try to get enough drives to populate the other half.
48 drives is a lot. Make sure you stagger the spin up and check the drives for bad ones before inserting. You don’t want to vibrate the lot to death for the sake of one drive.
48* 2TiB or more, even formatted. My my that is a lot of cat videos.
The enclosures’ backplane management handles power delivery, there’s probably no direct end user control over such things.
Going to test each one with my SATA desktop drive sled. I am hoping to score some 10tb drives in the next six months to populate the last 24 bays.
This is for putting video files for my nonprofit on. We will be recording events and gaming for YouTube and saving our twitch streams. Also working on developing ways to make good how to videos on TTRPGs
This topic was automatically closed 273 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.