Home NAS with SAS Drives

MouthBoy

MouthBoy

MouthBoy

Soldato
Joined
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Cambridgeshire
Hi All,

I have looked at other home NAS threads but cannot see anyone with this exact question. I have been given 6 x 6TB SAS drives, some that have only had a few hours of use, and I want to plop them into a PC/Server just to use as a NAS. I am unsure on a few things however.

I am conflicted between getting some older PC hardware and putting in the SAS drives by way of PCI slot cards, or getting an older server hardware and doing something similar. I will put in an SSD as a boot.

So, I have the drives, but I am unsure on the rest. Budget is genuinely as cheap as possible to make this happen. Restrictions are that it cannot be overly big or obtrusive and nothing that, at least when powered on and running, will be too noisy. It will be connected to Ethernet so no Wifi requirements. I am no good with servers stuff so really leaning on advice here. Regarding the OS, I am open to options here too.

Any advice is great.
 
Any direction on models? I've been looking and some seem "ok" on spec but just have 2 or 3 HDD spaces, and others just seem ridiculously huge for what they properly will deliver.

Is an option just to find pc parts from a few generations ago and stick in a SAS card? Would this cause issues not running things like ECC memory or is that just not a worry?
 
I'm assuming you're just storing files for home use? I'd be looking at zomething like

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/394721366024

2 of https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/303770606870

The card only has 2 ports, but the breakout cables expand that to 8

To get SAS onboard a motherboard, you're probably looking at server hardware which is generally massive, noisy and expensive, or old and massive, noisy and inefficient. For home use, you can put the SAS card in pretty much any PC with enough drive bays.

What model are the drives?
 
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ST6000NM0034 are the models. They were free and I plan to have 4 in use with 2 redundancy, I think.

So, just get/build a low power PC, 2 of those cards and a case to house? Do I need to consider anything regarding the hardware for SAS or the NAS OS?
 
MouthBoy said:
ST6000NM0034 are the models. They were free and I plan to have 4 in use with 2 redundancy, I think.

So, just get/build a low power PC, 2 of those cards and a case to house? Do I need to consider anything regarding the hardware for SAS or the NAS OS?
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The drives look fine. I was just thinking they might (though unlikely) be 10k drives which would be hot and noisy.

Yes, but just 1 card and 2 cables. Nothing special required OS wise as far as I'm aware other than raid card drivers.
 
i got a PCI-e card from a used server hardware reseller and a couple of cables from the rainforest to get my SAS connectivity. Unsure if I can name where I got the card as it might be seen as a competitor although they are only in the used server hardware market so should be ok. Any mods here able to advise and I will post the company?
 
Just buy a rebranded LSI 3008 or similar with two ports, use a forward breakout to take that to 4xSAS per port and away you go. I prefer to do that in IT mode and present bare drives to the OS as a rule hardware RAID is not generally the best option at this point for home users. Remember the HBA will require significant air flow, or a fan mounted to the heatsink. Supermicro cards generally come with factory IT mode firmware and 3008 is probably the best bang for your buck at this stage in terms of capability and price/efficiency, but a SAS2 card will do the same job with only 6 drives at a lower price point (but slightly higher idle power).

As to the discussion of ECC it was made popular in home server circles by quoting a TrueNAS dev out of context, the full quote actually provides context that is often over looked which pointed out it was nice to have if it were an option, in simple terms unless the entire data path from creation of the data to its storage and backup is ECC, it’s a largely moot point. Oh and while old server hardware *can* be inefficient, blanket statements suggesting it is are just silly. My ‘ancient’ Xeon v5 build (64GB ECC RAM, LSI 3008 HBA, 48TB SAS storage, 1TB Intel server 22110 capacitor backed up NVMe) idles at the same power level as my router (35w) while the two generations newer 8th gen i5 box is about 10x that at idle… You just have to ignore the 36 SAS drives, 2xHBA’s and 4TB NVMe U.2 pool.
 
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You can also get a EMC enclosure and a HBA card. Enclosures go for very very cheap on ebay. I bought one with 15*3TB disks for £200 last year. Idles at ~150W but I only power it on when I need it (backup) -it's all hotplug on linux- that's an insane amount of disks space for very little money.
 
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