[randusername]

I'm doing it anyway and I've found some secondhand deals. Maybe COVID homelabbers are offloading gear?

I built a 24 TB HDD NAS in a 36 bay chassis for around $1000 all-in: mb, ram, rails, chassis, rack, disks, hba, nic

Awful Watts/TB but the plan is to run it and the GPU rig on solar.

[trollbridge]

I obtained a used Dell PowerEdge and just stuffed a bunch of drives in there. It's old enough that the RAM is not overly expensive (DDR3), so it has 192GB of RAM to effectively cache the data, and then 32TB of raw storage. (Of course I regret not spending the extra money to take it to 384GB now.)

The nice thing about the array being big is that I can just RAID 1 it instead of worrying about tinkering with RAID 5, and leave a drive as a hot spare.

PCIe 2.5G NIC for the uplink, and then it can serve over SMB or iSCSI. The main use case for this thing, incidentally, is it just is a caching proxy that holds Docker images, models off of Huggingface, and so on.

[bix6]

36 bay? Why so many?

[randusername]

The 36 bay was all I could find on fb marketplace.

I fell in love with the silly idea of squeezing 10G NIC + 10G writes (to a 2x12 RAID 10 HDD array) on the thunderbolt bus of my 12 year old macbook pro.

Then I got distracted with the server mb and truenas and ZFS.

[Our_Benefactors]

What size discs are you using? This post is kind of hilarious, 24TB is achievable in literally a 2-bay NAS nowadays.

[RulerOf]

36 bays and only 24T of storage?

Can't you get that in a single disk that costs less than a kilodollar?

[a96]

That will be a single point of failure, though. (Which you might not care about depending on the backup strategy.)