On Wed, 3 Aug 2016 12:01:30 AM Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
IMO if you're going to do it at all, do it right - and with an eye towards the future. that means spending some money.
you'll need a case, a motherboard, RAM and a powersupply.
The Silverstone DS380 is very nice (8 x 3.5/2.5" hot-swap SAS/SATA bays + 4 internal 2.5" bays), but costs nearly $200 ($185 from CPL is cheapest i could find). And that doesn't include a power supply - it takes an SFX small-form-factor PSU...that's another $50-$100.
It's nice that you can get a case that can handle 8 disks for $200. But as 6TB disks are affordable and 8TB disks are available hardly anyone needs more than 4 disks for a home server.
even if you have no intention of ever filling all 8 hot-swap bays, the extras are useful for occasionally inserting a drive, running a backup (e.g with rsync or btrfs send or zfs send) and then removing it, AND taking it off-site (e.g. to work, to a family member, or anywhere else)
The other option is to just use a USB caddy for extra drives. Even at USB 2.0 speeds I haven't had any problems doing backups. But eSATA is a lot faster as is USB 3.
and having hot-swap bays that can hold 3.5" AND 2.5" drives is ideal. SSDs are rapidly becoming bigger and cheaper. for any business or org with a good budget they're already a better choice than HDDs for storage servers (e.g. samsung 2TB SSDs are under $1000 in au, and they just released a 4TB SSD for $1500 USD), and it won't be more than a few years before 1-4TB drives are cheap enough to be a no-brainer for home use too.
If you want a server for serious performance then a couple of large SATA disks for main storage and a couple of NVMe devices in PCIe cards for ZIL and L2ARC would be the way to go. In the long term I think that 2.5" disks won't be a useful option for many people. Anyone who is designing a laptop now should design for M.2 except for the corner-case of >15" laptops. Anyone who is designing a motherboard now should include 2*M.2 sockets on it. For all storage nowadays you either want the speed of SATAe (which is most easily realised with M.2) or the capacity and price of 3.5" disks. If you want a serious file server (which Piers doesn't seem to want) then ECC RAM is very important. Filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS (which you should use if you want lots of reliable storage) don't handle the type of corruption that bad RAM gives very well. Finally instead of buying systems for such use getting them for free is a better option for most people. I recently gave away a Dell PowerEdge T110 that has 8G of ECC RAM and 4 SATA bays. I have made arrangements to give away a HP micro server with 4 SATA bays (only 3 have caddies at this time). I have given away many dual-core AMD64 systems and a few quad-core systems. I don't think Piers is near enough to take advantage of such free offers, but I'm sure there are free PCs where he is. Linux just needs less hardware than Windows. Apart from laptops and tower servers I stopped buying PCs for myself before AMD64 became commonly used. Windows users just discard better stuff than I need. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/