The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Kai_ on 2025-01-14 05:43:40.
Hi all. Like many I've self-taught over many years on /r/buildapc and am fairly confident with consumer hardware. Now that I'm approaching building a NAS though I'm realising that there is a lot of knowledge in the enterprise domain that starts to become necessary.
Are there any recommended resources for approaching a rack-mounted NAS/SAN build?
Some questions so far:
- I assume ECC memory is recommended?
- Are there motherboards better suited to this application rather than typical gaming mobos? If the intent is to have a number of PCI.e or SAS/SATA SSDs, are there mobos that just have 10-20 of these?
- Never explored SAS, is this recommended over SATA for the disk's, or just used as a breakout intermediary? I understand a SAS controller can be split into multiple SATA ports
- Are the form factors of rack mounted machines still the standard ATX / mATX / ITX etc? Or would we be looking at something else like a blade/backplane board with a totally different arrangement.
- Are we usually looking at the same CPU sockets and chipsets? I've seen references to dedicated disk controllers but assume that that wouldn't be applicable if the goal is to present all disks to the OS kernel directly?