Pretend your only other hardware is a repurposed HP Prodesk and your budget is bottom-barrel
Mash into a thick paste and smooth over wholewheat bread with a dash of salt.
I would haunt eBay for an old file bay, such as an HP Proliant or a NetApp, then get an HBA card, and hope there is a spot in my house that isn’t going to be bothered by the noise. There’s a seller called theartofserver on eBay that repurposes old enterprise grade stuff for self hosting use, and I got a card that connected a NetApp file bay to my old 4th gen gaming rig, and that’s where all my files live now. I’ve lost a few drives over the years, but no files.
Haha crazy to randomly come across that name on Lemmy. I bought a bunch of the parts for my NAS/Proxmox server from that seller a couple years ago.
Me too! Are you me? Oh no, I’ve finally lost it… I’m talking to myself.
Wait… New answer! I’d give them to the first guy who replied to me on Lemmy! He would be very appreciative.
Would he‽
Yup! Definitely.
Sell them and buy low budget low power consumption disks that would fit my purpose.
Enterprise-grade usually has enterprise-grade power consumption. From the power saving alone you can buy nice stuff.
Please do not sell used enterprise hard drives, especially if you got them from your empoyer. This is how those emberrasing company secrets get leaked and we can’t have that can we? :)
Then those disks should have been wiped at the company before they were allowed to leave the building.
This is a great observation, and it made me do some math:
If my point of comparison is something like a seagate ironwolf 4T vs a WD Ultrastar 4T:
Seagate Ironwolf: - 3.7W*24 Hours/day*635 days/year = 32kWh per year * $0.18/kWh = $5.84 per year in power usage * 12 disks in an array = $70.02 per year WD Ultrastar: - 7W*24 Hours/day*635 days/year = 61kWh per year * $0.18/kWh = $11.05 per year in power usage * 12 disks in an array = $132.6 per yearSeems like i’d save maybe $70 per year. I feel like that difference might even be justifiable if the enterprise drives are half as likely to fail (seagate ironwolf has an AFR of 0.87%, WD Ultrastar is 0.44%).
Something to think about, at least
In defence, the power prizing here is a tad different, €0.45/KWh was the prize here. Also, when those disks are given away, they are usually smaller then the current standard and less efficient. On the other hand, those enterprise grade disks generate some heat, saving on the heating bill.
635 days is a fucking long year.
Lol, thanks
2020 mood math.
Sometimes a day just FEELS like it’s 48 hours long.
solid advice.
Sell them on eBay, buy an SSD based device.
Buy a cheap Disk shelf the Netapp ds4246 (do not remember the smaller models name) and a cheap used hba (host bus adapter) to plug it into.
No matter how you go about it, getting these drives set up to be reliable isn’t going to be cheap. If you want to run without an enclosure, at the very least (and assuming you are running Linux) you are going to want something like LSI SAS cards with external ports, preferably a 4-port card (around $50-$100, each port will run four drives) that you can flash into IT mode. You will need matching splitter cables (3x $25 each). And most importantly you need a VERY solid power supply, preferably something with redundancy (probably $100 or more). These prices are based on used hardware from ebay, except for the cables, and you’ll have to do some considerable research to learn how to flash the SAS cards, and which ones can be flashed.
Of course this is very bare-bones, you won’t have a case to mount the drives in, and splitter cables from the power supply can be finicky, but with time and experience it can be made to work very well. My current NAS is capable of handling up to 32 external and 8 internal drives and I’m using 3D-printed drive cages with some cheap SATA2 backplanes to finally get a rock-solid setup. It takes a lot of work and experience to do things cheaply.
Why immediate jump to IT mode? Sure ZFS is great but running ZFS takes a decent chunk of RAM for cache.
I would send 4 of them free of charge to @TseseJuer@lemmy.world
Remember the dude who managed to trade a paperclip for a home with a few transactions in between? Basically that depending on the exact monetary value of said bottom-barelness :)
Sell. I don’t run a data center and I’m not a cloud provider. I have a meager home server with some stuff plugged in and serve some tv shows. I want this to be as low foot print as possible. If it goes over 10w idle, I’m shutting it down lol.
If I remember correctly, every watt is around $1 a year. So a 100 watt server costs $100 a year every year to run. 12 SAS drives and the server is going to be expensive to keep running.
1W would be 8.769kWh per year. Pricing is regional.
What’s your hardware? 10w sounds great to me. I just started a new build and have to play around to see if I can get better C-states while idle.
11th gen NUC. Much faster than a RPI4, more power if needed (for things like Zigbee USB adapters, external drives…) while still maintaining low power draw on idle. It will jump to 20-30W when transcoding but I dont mind higher power draws when im actually using the thing.
Damn 10watts? My server has a 5800x in it(my old cpu) and I have never seen the system pull less than 130watts
Yeah a lot of people will say to just use your old PC thats lying around and it is a great way to start and learn but if you want something with a lower footprint (low power, quiet, cool) you’re better off buying something more suited to that task. Laptops or mini PCs are much more suited to that.
Id love to have a server rack one day but I just cant justify it drawing so much power when I can live with the drawbacks of a smaller server.
As others have said… HBA and a disk shelf
I went this route when I had too many 3.5 drives. The dsxxx that I got even came fully loaded with drives, only 1.2tb though
How bottom-barrel? Old-ass Dell servers are pretty cheap from various sources.
You don’t say what the capacity is or how old they are. They might not be worth using.
By selling them and buying something more useful.
I would sell a few of them to shore up the budget, then use those funds to build a NAS box. You can buy everything other than drives for a few hundred, less if you have spare parts sitting around.
Looking past the folks recommending to sell them, it seems you have a handful of useful responses here (welcome to the internet & endless September). /snark Look past the naysayers, it will be fun and a learning experience just getting these drives up and running - a worthwhile experience IMHO.
I am down a similar path now, with a bunch of SAS drives. What I have learned/experienced so far:
- Forget any USB docking stations or enclosures, they may advertise working for all SAS drives but are hit & miss expensive but cheaply made plastic crap.
- There are a plethora of adapters available online that say you can convert SAS to SATA. Do not believe them - you need a SATA controller that also supports SAS. You may luck out and have a motherboard that has the right SATA chipset that supports SAS, you may not.
As others have mentioned in this thread, the easiest & optimal approach seems to be:
- Get a low end workstation or server that supports SAS in the chipset and the drive bays
- Get a low end workstation or server that supports SAS in the chipset and that you can add the drive bays you need
- Get a low end workstation or server that you can install a controller card that supports SAS
I scored a free workstation from craigslist and one from freecycle, for another project on the workbench.
HTH, and good luck!
(Edited for formatting)
