Hey everyone!
Looking for some advice! I had originally planned on going the route of buying a disk shelf and connecting it to a rackmount host machine but was scared away after being advised by a relatively well known youtuber that he would not advise disk shelves due to the many issues he and others have had with them in the past as it relates to the host machine not seeing the shelf after reboots. Now I assume the proper reboot procedure/order had been done and it was just some inherent issues of running two separate machines and the potential pitfalls that come along with that.
I'm new to the NAS space and I'm still learning, I currently use a asustor lockerstor 10 gen 3, but I want to move towards and build a unit using truenas/ZFS. I was looking at units on ebay, amazon, you name it. Some of the stuff on amazon had me concerned about backplane failures, cheap construction leading to hard drive destruction and what not. I've learned quite a bit the last month, HBAs seem simple enough but SAS cabling, different backplane configurations, certain backplane limitations or pitfalls are all things I don't want to overlook and get wrong. If I build my own 15 drive server with an amazon case, is direct wiring 15 drives even practical? or does it just leave a massive nest of wires leading to airflow/cooling issues?
My rack is in my basement, sound is not a concern, plenty of space left in the rack.
I guess I'm just wondering if you'd be willing to share what you're running and your experiences with it!