If you were to suddenly come into possession of 12+ enterprise-grade SAS hard drives, how would you go about incorporating them into your homelab? - eviltoast

Pretend your only other hardware is a repurposed HP Prodesk and your budget is bottom-barrel

  • CalicoJack@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    9 months ago

    I would sell a few of them to shore up the budget, then use those funds to build a NAS box. You can buy everything other than drives for a few hundred, less if you have spare parts sitting around.

    • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.socialOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      I think this might strike the right balance.

      I kinda get where everyone else is coming from, about enterprise grade drives being more performance than needed, but with the reliability of these drives it just doesn’t make sense to me to get rid of them all. The power use difference between these and other NAS drives is pretty negligible, and the parts needed to utilize a SAS array aren’t all that expensive in comparison to buying new drives (even if I sold all of these, I don’t think i could get as much for them as what even a used consumer drive would be).

      These are 4TB drives, so an array of 4 in a raid 5 configuration would get me 12 TB. I could go up to a more redundant raid with more disks, so maybe I’ll get a shelf/case that can hold 6 or 8 or even 12, and plan for adding more later. I have a high-efficiency micro-atx sitting on my desk with a couple empty PCIE slots, all i’m missing I think is a SAS controller and a case/PSU.

      I’m always hurting for more space, so to me it’s smart even just to have them sitting on a shelf for when I need another.