Symyr

Since the current title is: Explain This To Me... WHO is Buying Giant Laptops??. I figured i would throw in another opinion that's more based on size instead of performance of these laptops. My parents for example use a 19"laptop. Why? Because they like the larger screen to read their emails, browse the web, watch youtube or make their own picture album of a trip. I've told them plenty of times i would gladly put together a small pc that can do the same for them but they don't want to have a desk with a computer anywhere in the living room or kitchen and instead prefer to put the laptop away to the side or in a drawer untill they need it again. I got an aunt who has a similar mindset and even worse, she keeps the damn 19" laptop on a desk in her living room and never moves it! So neither of them needs a gaming machine like we see in the video but they definitely want a 19" laptop if for no other reason then having a big screen that they can easily put away. Sadly that market share shrinks every year so i hope i keep finding them such devices.

After thinking about it for awhile, i decided i can't justify spending that amount of money on it in my current situation. So the plan that i'm forming now is using my old consumer hardware, taking the old busted cases from my brother and me and making 1 good case. Then install freenas on it, it will lack ecc but the i7 4770k is more then enough for what it will need to do and i got like 32gb of ddr3 ram that's still good lying around here. Gonna have to check how many sata connections it has but then at the end of the line i'll only have to buy a psu and look into what kind of expander cards i need. Kinda sad that i can't go nerdy with an actual server but gotta stay realistic after all.

Yeah that's why i included the option for 12 trays since that was the max amount i could select with em but i'm thinking of asking if it's possible to get more. Havent found a G8 with 3,5" bays yet sadly. Seems the vast majority is all 2,5" bays. Think i'll just have to take the financial hit now and then i'll be good for a longer period i guess.

So they got back to me and they got a refurbished HP ML350 G9 24 bay 4U server for 2 655 €, looks like what you linked @Electronics Wizardy. I took the options for caddy tray since it didn't say if they were included but it was only 12 so i would have to find more. CPU: - 2x E5-2620v3 2,4Ghz, RAM: - 64 GB, 2 years of warranty While waiting for them i also found another onlineshop that supposedly sells ZFS Ready servers, hardware looks up to snuff in my amateur opinion . Price isn't amateur though coming in at 2 882€ for the config that i took which was the following: - Mobo: Supermicro X10DRi max. 1TB 6x PCIe 2x GbE IPMI 2.0 - CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2603v4 15M / 6x 1.70GHz / 6T / 85W - RAM: 32 GB DDR4 ECC Reggistreerd Samsung Org. - No HDD because it will be cheaper to buy on my own. - Controller: LSI 9300-8i HBA 8-poorts SAS / SATA 12GB / s PCIe (standard included) - Chassis & power supply: Super CSE-846BE1C-R1K28B 4U 24x 3,5 "SAS / SATA 12 Gb / s hotswap (1 + 1) 1280W - 3 years of warranty

That still is a bit small, the enclosure i'm looking at is like electronics wizardy linked earlier. Seems like the EU 2nd hand market is a bit older and alot more expensive then the US market, but i'll know more once i get that response from the company, it is the weekend after all.

Yeah with the amount of drives i got/need that won't work for me but looks nice man. Haven't heard of openmedia vault yet, might check it out. Always nice to see new things. I'm lucky enough that we got a crawlspace so i have cat5e running to a couple of rooms. On a sidenote i actually found a refurb company in a country near me but i'm waiting for them to come back to me since on the site i only saw 12bay servers. And tbh if i want to only have 12 bays i might aswell use a normal desktop case and fill that up ? .

Gonna have to remember that, i mean it sounds logical now that you said it Also seems that the ebay seller doesn't send to belgium sadly. Been looking around on 2nd hand hardware in EU but it seems our market is not only older then what's on the US market but also more expensive. Sometimes there is appearantly a deal to be made but those usually get snatched up in a heartbeat and aren't as often as one would like. So i think it's back to what i thought at the start of this project and try to build a sort of "prosumer" server instead of trying to find a prebuilt. If anything it will make me understand things better. Now while looking around i've heard people buying old supermicro, dell, hp or whatever chassis but i think i read somewhere that some older backplanes don't support larger then 2TB drives so i would rather avoid that. I found that people use servercase or xcase both UK based firms who appearantly are trying to compete with supermicro and chenbro (guy from servercase actually said it in one of their own videos) at a lower price point. So yeah since it all starts with the box i looked at both those company's, 1 i linked a 4U before but i'll link it again. From servercase.uk they sell this logiccase for about 340 including taxes and then with xcase they sell their own made chassis for 323 with taxes. Why did i choose these? They seem affordable and overall reviews seem to be ok for them plus i saw them used by people in their own builds. For the rest of the hardware, i'm not sure but i think an amd build would be ok.? Appearantly ryzen supports ecc, although it's unofficial. Not a 100% on how to proceed atm but let me know what you guys think and we'll go from there? Thanks for the help so far!

- Ah yeah that kinda makes sense, i still have a 120gb ssd lying around that worked fine for years so i can use that. -Yeah figured i would be for the forseeable future, it just baffles me that external drives are cheaper i mean it should be the other away around considering they have an enclosure with connector ports, power & data cables, just can't understand why it's cheaper. - Sadly that vendor doesn't seem to ship to my country (Belgium in the EU) so i'm gonna try and find something with the same specs that i can have delivered here. It does take away some of the fun of diy'ing the hardwarde and just leaves the configuration part. - Did some reading and up till now i was under the assumption that you could just take an hba expander OR a sas expander but it seems i would need both for it to work. I'll see what i can find and then let you know what i find in case i overlooked something, thanks for the help so far!

- I still see alot of people recommending to use usb's for freenas because of the small amount of storage you need for the os and quick and easy replacement if a stick should fail though. - Hmm had not thought about that, i thought there would be slow drives in the external enclosure but i guess you can't get slower then 5400rpm, i'll look into that thanks. - i'm personally not a big fan of used servers since you never know what that hardware has gone through plus the one i showed is cheap because it's just a chassis, that's why i also asked if anyone had suggestions for motherboard, cpu & ram. I've actually seen that vendor talked about in a good way in several discussion forums so i think build quality is fine. - So something like this then? Never worked with expansion cards like this so want to be sure before i do anything because i don't see an sff standard in that post. - Looking into expander cards now and so they are basically the same thing as i linked above but just with more ports then? - Having mobo & cpu built in would be easier yes but i do want to learn more about this stuff as you might have guessed by now i'm a bit out of my depth on serverhardware but again i want to learn. And just buying something with everything in it wouldn't really teach me anything. The personal pictures & movies and such are all backupped on the current setup (dare i call it a server?) and then an external drive atm, in time i hope to convince my brother to have a similar setup at his house so we can backup to eachothers server but that is waayy into the future not even on the horizon atm.

Hey i'm trying to build a decent nas after basically just adding HDD's in an old desktop for years. In the past it wasn't an issue because it was just movies and shows but over the years i've been using it more and more as a bit of a backup server so i want some more peace of mind about my files. What do i got? 2 4TB & 2 6TB drives, 1 4TB is basically full and the others are at 65% capacity. So that's 20TB that's close (relative but still ? ) to being full. What's my idea so far? I've been thinking of doing a freenas build because ZFS seems to be nice to make sure there is no data corruption, in a Z2 config. Using 6 x 10TB wd red drives for that in z2 and using 2 8GB usb sticks for booting in mirror. I know ecc isn't necessary but if it's not too much extra i would still use it and i think 16GB RAM would be enough for a storage / mediastreaming server (atm max users is 2 and i don't see that rising soon). Using those 10TB drives would give me a fresh 40TB storage so double what i got atm and give me some reserve for the future + security for drivefailure. I would keep my current config and this new one running next to eachother for about half a year to make sure it's all ok and then take the 4 drives i currently have with 2 new 10TB drives in a new Z2 pool. It's my understanding that those 10TB drives would only be as big as the smallest drive in the pool so 4TB, i don't know if the size grows after i replace old the What i want to achieve with this build: Enough space in my server to 1) add more disks in the future and 2) have space to spare on my drives, i'm fine with a servercase like a 2U up to a 4U, a webgui would be nice but i can do commandline too And what i don't know is basically what kind of motherboard, cpu, ram would be best? Casesuggestions? FYI i've looked at possible cases already and while seeming over the top this 4u servercase seems to be fine since it has 24 bays of which 12 would be used if the idea i described above comes into play. I know that i need cables and such because of the backplane so i was thinking using sas to sata and plug those 4 sata's straight into the motherboard and then for the rest of the connectors use a sas cable to a storage controller that can handle sas cables. I just looked at what looks like it should work but since i'm not sure if it does so i'm hoping people here can help me along. Thanks for reading and i hope i'm somewhat on the ball here.

Well i think it's good he made this because i hope people will learn to think before spouting their opinion. Like he said in the video, imagine if people got upset like that whenever you don't know something that is common to them. In school you can't ask stuff anymore because others will chew you out or at work your stuck with a problem and you can't ask a coworker because you'll get this stuff in your face if you do ask. It creates an environment where people are uncomfortable to ask even the simplest things. If only a couple people that see this video stop to think next time they feel like flaming someone for not knowing something then this has been well worth the effort.

So i'm guessing that nobody has any idea if internal or external has speed differences? Guess i'll just assume it goes a bit slower and get an internal one.

So i'll go with a bluray station but still not sure if i should go with internal or external. I don't buy games every other month and once those movies are ripped it will just be in my case again doing nothing except add to the weight when i decide to move it for cleaning. Although i care more if the speed will still be the same at which it installs or reads and writes anything. Also not bad if they are equal in longevity, maybe this could work for a workshop video for Luke , testing the speeds of internal vs external. Although i don't want him to have another "it doesn't matter" moment .

My internet speed is fine actually but i'm a person who sticks with physical media, i don't buy dlc either unless it comes with the game i'm buying i'm not playing it. I'm thinking of ripping the blu-rays i have to my pc so i don't have to go looking for it when i want to watch a movie. Now when i want to watch a movie i have to watch it on my tv with the bluray player that's attached to it, which is fine but i like to be on my pc and watch a movie too. @HimommiesLuckily they do have the installer on the disc or i would have been blocked ages ago. @NumLock214k media isn't all that yet so i'm sure if i buy a new bluray or dvd station now that it will last till 4k media is normal or atleast more common

So my current optical drive that i've used for 6 years or more is starting to fail ; when installing a game it will get stuck till i open and close it and it also doesn't open on the first try anymore. So i'm looking for a replacement but i'm wondering if it's worth going bluray drive or just get another standard one. Also is external equal to internal (read/write wise)? Having it internal isn't a problem it's just that i barely use it so if it's less weight in my case i'm happy.