I currently have a pretty simple media server. It runs on a desktop made of old parts and has 4 6 TB drives in a raidz1 array. It is used by a lot of friends who add a lot of media, so its been nearly at capacity for a while. The desktop has no more open SATA ports or drive enclosures, so I’m not sure what the best option for adding more drives is.
I know the most obvious answer is buying NAS, but I think it might be a little complex for what I need, because no other devices need any access to this storage. I was considering purchasing a DAS, as it seems like a simple option, but I’ve seen many people say its not worth purchasing a DAS over a NAS. Any opinions would be appreciated.
Edit: Thanks for the suggestions! I’m likely going to go with a new case for some extra drive bays and a PCI-E SAS controller, this seems like the best option for the simplicity and price!
I have the Silverstone GD-08 case that can fit 12 hard drives. It’s an inexpensive solution for a dedicated htpc/media server. Even managed to fit in an RX 6600 so my wife can play low spec games on the tv.
Then all you need is a pcie expansion card as others suggested.
That’s a great suggestion, thank you! I looked at a few cases with more drive space but didn’t see any this inexpensive.
I use a Fractal Design Define R6 but their newer model is around the same price (it actually appears to be $60 cheaper than the Silverstone case on NewEgg) and can hold the same number of drives. They’re solid cases.
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/define/define-7/
For your lack of SATA ports, you can either buy a new mobo (use PCPartPicker and filter by SATA ports) or an LSI SAS HBA card to gain additional SATA ports.
I didn’t know that case could fit that many drives! I’m a fan of Fractal Designs cases, have used and recommended them for a few gaming PCs before. Thanks for the recommendation!
Yeah it only comes with 6 trays, so you’ll need to order more, but you can fill out the entire front section with drives.
If you have a free PCIE slot, you can just get a SATA controller card.
I see other’s talk about an m.2 -> SATA adapter, but I just don’t see the point if you have a free PCIE slot
I wasn’t aware of these! I’ll need to check when I have a chance, but I’m fairly sure there’s an open slot, thanks!
He said that he’s exhausted his drive enclosures:
The desktop has no more open SATA ports or drive enclosures, so I’m not sure what the best option for adding more drives is.
So I guess he could use eSATA and some kind of external enclosure or something, but he’s gonna need more than just throwing more drives in the desktop and adding a PCI SATA controller card to get more places to plug 'em in.
Well, the usual way I’ve seen people deal with this is either open up the case and leave the extra drives dangling to the side, or just lay them on the bottom of the case (or on top) and don’t move it any more.
That works. Though, if you want to imitate that… Pay attention to the temperature of the harddisks. There is no air circulation if you just lay them flat on the floor and they might take damage from getting too warm.
But you can’t really beat the price of that solution. 25 bucks for a SATA card and some old shoe rack with holes in the shelves, and you’re set. Ready to accomodate 4 more harddisks.
A thing you may not be aware of, which is nifty, is the M.2 -> SATA adapters.
They work well enough for consumer use, and they’re a reasonably cheap way of adding another 4-6 SATA ports.
And, bonus, you don’t need to add the heat/power and complexity of some decade old HBA to the mix, which is a solution I’ve grown to really, really, dislike.
If you’re not worried about the desktop’s age or ability, you can just expand the array by growing the volume with bigger drives.
You don’t want to run raid on a DAS unless it for some reason handles it’s own, and then you might as well just get a NAS.
If you’re simply looking for more disk slots, you could rebuild and transfer your array into another machine, but then you’re probably back to NAS being a cheaper option.
As others have said, running out of motherboard SATA slots doesn’t mean you need a new machine to support expansion.
You can get m2 adapter slots for more SATA drives.
If you think you’ll be building a NAS in the future, and are cheap like I am, you might consider getting a pci-e expansion card for SAS rather than SATA drives. They’re backwards compatibile with SATA drives, but open you up to being able to use SAS drives which are common in enterprise data centers. You can get used lots of those drives on eBay WAY cheaper per TB when the data centers hour them out.
I’ve got a machine with 16 SAS drives running the unRaid OS, and I’m very happy with it for data hoarding and media serving. The drives (with shipping) cost $5/TB.
I hadn’t really looked into SAS drives, but that sounds like a great option. $5/TB is awesome!
Have you considered setting up a virtual drive throuh RCLONE and use encrypted cloud storage?
I use a USB-attached drive array for some bulk, low-throughput storage. I’ve been happy with this, except for one thing that I didn’t think about prior to getting mine: a considerable number of these, including mine, do not have the option to power on after power loss. This is extremely obnoxious if you use or have any intention of using the computer remotely and would like it to come back up after power loss. For me, it was the only component that couldn’t be brought back up automatically.
I’m in the process of switching to one that does right now, but I’d mention it to you to as something to keep in mind.
I considered a NAS as well myself, but didn’t want it for a couple of reasons:
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I am generally not happy about having a lot of hardware that can potentially phone home on a network. The drive array is isolated, and I control the PC (well, short of the BIOS/firmware/etc).
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I had an existing machine that could perfectly reasonably serve the stuff that had adequate uptime. If you’re going to be serving content to friends, you may not want to be using, say, a desktop that you use for other things, since if you need to reboot it, you’re going to interrupt their use.
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Trying to understand whether NASes have implemented things securely worries me. There are a number of cases where I’ve been unpleasantly surprised before with network transport of data (e.g. when I looked at it at one point, SMB having secure authentication but then shipping the actual data over the network in plaintext).
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Also not sure how long the NAS gets security updates.
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Also sometimes companies have been purchased by other companies or tried to get creative in figuring out ways to make more money from existing customers, like having routers insert ads in webpages. If the product can’t touch the network, the issue doesn’t come up.
One reason that I would consider getting a NAS over DAS is if you want the server to be physically distant from the storage array. USB isn’t really made to run long distances – you need repeaters, and there are distance limitations, though you can get, and I have, optical transceivers for longer runs. Ethernet is designed for this and works fine with it.
All a NAS is is a separation of concerns, if you build a system who’s only job is to provide networked storage, then that system is a NAS. If you buy an off the shelf “NAS” and proceed to run a bunch of services on it, that is a home server, not a NAS. Build your own NAS and most of your concerns go away.
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