I want to build a proper server with room for 40+ HDDs to move my media server to and have RAID 1. I know a lot about PCs and software, but when it comes to server hardware I have no clue what I’m doing. How would I go about building a server that has access to 40+ RAID 1’d HDDs?
40 drives ? Why that is a huge amount of power , what is your space target
RAID 1 ? With 40 drives ? That would be absolutely stupid you want to use RAID 6 or 10 so you don’t waist 50 % of your space with RAID 1. Or some other N+2 disk redundancy.
Have you considered how much power such a large setup will need?
I’ll have to watch a video on it later, I assumed having a 1:1 backup was the most efficient backup method possible without compression. I don’t plan on utilizing every drive at once, and I don’t plan on having more than 20 to start with, but it won’t be much more than I already have, so I should be okay to start. I just want to make sure there room for expansion in the future. I don’t need all 40 immediately. My UPS will tell me how much power I’m drawing, right?
You need to research raid 1,6,10 and zfs first. Make an informed decision and go from there. You’re basing the number of drives off of (uninformed) assumptions and that’s going to drive all of your decisions the wrong way. Start with figuring out your target storage amount and how many drive failures you can tolerate.
Skip ZFS unless you’re planning to get all 40 drives up front, which is pretty bonkers for a home server setup. Acquiring 40 drives incrementally and you’ll be hit with the hidden cost of ZFS.
40-drive RAID is moving out of homelab territory and pretty deep into enterprise storage systems.
Do you already have these 40 drives or are you spacing out a new NAS from scratch?
If it’s from scratch I’d first see if I could get it down to 20 or 24 larger drives to allow the whole thing to fit in a single 4U rackmount case.
Bigger than that and you’re probably stuck with proprietary NAS hardware to link together multiple racks.
With 140TB+ of existing data, I would need 16 18TB HDDs to have RAID 1, and I also need the ability to expand. Really, I just need to have all the data accessible over the network so I can manage it from my main PC and stream it via a Plex/Jellyfin server. Maybe 4 smaller DIY NAS systems accessed by a separate system? I would really prefer no proprietary software if I can avoid it, and enterprise is out of my price range after I’ll be spending $3,000+ on HDDs.
With that many drives why raid 1? You could do a few raid z2 or z3 vdevs in truenas.
Doesn’t that keep more than two copies? RAID 1 is expensive enough as is. I just need to be able to pop in a replacement drive if one fails so I don’t lose data.
The chance of a rebuild taking longer than a failure occurring is non zero. RAID 1 is less protection that raid 50 or raid 60, plus depending on how many disks you have you will save space and get better performance.
But you need a good controller.
I’ll have to watch a video later I guess. I know it’s possible to lose a drive while it’s rebuilding, but it’s improbable, and I figured it takes more space, I’m okay taking that risk since I’m not handling irreplaceable data, just my personal TV/movie archive for now. But if it can save space, I’ll have to consider it.
40 HDD is a lot.
Check out 45 Drives. They have a homelab focused offering that has 15 bays https://45homelab.com/#product
To get 40 hard drives, you’d be looking at something like their Storinator S45 https://www.45drives.com/products/storinator-s45-configurations.php
40+ disks ?? I crammed a mini server with 7 old HDD’s totaling 2 tb and felt I was king of self-hosted! Now I feel small and peasant-like, damn you ;)
I am a bit curios what the average amount of disks/totalsize is for other data hoard… self hosters in this sub ?
I only have 140TB atm, but I plan to expand. I want to backup all my Blu-rays, which will be at least 10 more HDDs. 2TBs used to be a lot. Lol
I have 300 blu-rays ripped full quality and that only takes 8.28TB. My entire media collection is just over 12TB. I have a friend who has a massively larger library and even he gets by with a NAS. My NAS only has ten disks and I have 84TB of storage. You’re over-estimating your needs.
