Are Disk Shelves Worth It? - eviltoast

I’m looking to buy some 20tb drives to upgrade my NAS. It currently hosts a 12x3tb striped mirror setup on Truenas Scale plugged into a NetApp DS4246 24 bay. It is backed up elsewhere.

With how large HDDs and even SSDs are getting I would only need a mirrored 20tb pair to cover my current data and have quite a bit of open space left yet. (Like double) Eventually it will grow though. My backup uses a Rosewill case with 15bays. It seems ridiculous to only put two drives in a 24bay shelf. Even if I use another Rosewill case and put 14 drives in it, in a striped mirror setup that is 140tb.

Is it worth using the extra power of the shelf vs just a Rosewill case and some lsi cards? I wouldn’t even need the lsi cards just yet. I’m contemplating selling the shelf and current drives and replacing it with 4 20tb. A mirror on the main setup and a mirror on the backup in two Rosewill cases. I do realize I lose the redundant power supplies.

(I realize that people in the data hoarder category are in a different situation but I don’t plan on having 140tb of data in the near future.)

  • YooperKirks@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    Ha, no.

    SSD arrays absolutely have there place and I have deployed many for clients. But it is not the only performance solution. Like others have said capacity / performance planning is a must to know what you need and what you will need.

    • diamondsw@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Hard drives are for capacity. SSD’s are for performance. This has been settled for a number of years, and is why you see multiple levels of caching in front of any modern enterprise storage system.