The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/AshleyUncia on 2024-06-09 16:04:28.
So here's the situation; I currently live with my spouse in a one bedroom apartment built in 1922. For this reason there are some real issues with the loads on the electrical circuits between my network storage, gaming PC, HTPCs and so on. Plus just 'physical space' and noise limitations.
As such, when my 16 drive UnRAID server ran out of drive slots, the only solution was to build a second server which is in the Livingroom, in a 4U Rosewill case, sitting discretely in an Ikea Lack table with caster wheels. The main server has a Ryzen 9 3950X and does all the dockers and stuff. The secondary server has an Intel E5 2697v2 and sits there eating electricity for the sake of letting me run 12 more drives.
But we're moving! Three floors! Gonna run ethernet in all the walls. There will be a finished basement area for 'the gaming goodness' and I can finally set up network and storage in a real rack, on the unfinished side of the basement, with it's own 15amp circuit and where no one will care how much noise anything in there makes. That means I an get disk shelf and make all of this way less stupid!
The main plan is to retire the server inside the 4U rack case, then transplant the main tower server into that 4U rack case and expand it's drive capacity with a disk shelf. So here's where I have questions:
Firstly, things like the NetApp DS4246 and related seem to be what I'm looking at. All my drives are SATA, to these disk shelves support SATA out of the box, is additional hardware required for SATA drives, or do I need to look for something alternate/specific?
Secondly, these shelves offer up to four PSUs for redundancy, but how many are needed at minimum assuming 'up time' is not a major concern? Also what kind of power consumption should I see beyond the drives it's powering? I should def see an advantage over a whole 11 year old Xeon running, right?
Thirdly, for the 'host server' to access this kind of disk shelf, I should only require something like an LSI 9201-16E and a quartet of 8088 to SFF-8088 cables, right? From there on, the host device should just have an LSI controller which see's up to 24 drives on it, and it's all happy and 'just works'?