How to connect 20 drives to a single pc?

[Zebriah]

For clarification, I have 4 SATA drives I use with a small pc setup as a NAS. I just came into ownership of 10 500gb HDD's, 3 120gb SSD's, and 3 240gb SSD's being tossed by a local business. I want to add them to my current NAS. I use AWS glacier for backup storage already so I'm not looking to do RAID or redundancy. I want this as pure additional storage.

 

I've thought of sata exp cards but only have a single pcie x16 port and 4 sata on mobo. 

What's the thought on getting a powered usb hub and enough sata2usb cables?

I've never used SAS but seen a mSAS card that can connect 16 sata drives but don't know how that works out.

[RageTester]

Don't do it, such low capacity drives will consume much power. I mean cheap external 4TB USB drives already in enclosure are an option, got one recently. You can just use those small ones for offline backups.

 

Else you would need to buy something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Syba-Swappable-Drive-External-Enclosure/dp/B07MD2LNYX/ref=sr_1_6?_encoding=UTF8&c=ts&dchild=1&keywords=Computer+Hard+Drive+Enclosures&qid=1625546136&s=pc&sr=1-6&ts_id=160354011

[BondiBlue]

I wouldn't bother with that. Those 10 drives add up to a very underwhelming 5TB of RAW capacity. You can get that much storage for less than $100 these days, and using many low capacity drives adds far too many failure points unless you use RAID. Then, if you do use RAID you'll be cutting your capacity back even more. That's not even dealing with the space, heat and power consumption aspect. 

 

If you do want to use them all then I'd just get an external enclosure like the previous reply mentioned. 

[LIGISTX]

27 minutes ago, Zebriah said:

For clarification, I have 4 SATA drives I use with a small pc setup as a NAS. I just came into ownership of 10 500gb HDD's, 3 120gb SSD's, and 3 240gb SSD's being tossed by a local business. I want to add them to my current NAS. I use AWS glacier for backup storage already so I'm not looking to do RAID or redundancy. I want this as pure additional storage.

 

I've thought of sata exp cards but only have a single pcie x16 port and 4 sata on mobo. 

What's the thought on getting a powered usb hub and enough sata2usb cables?

I've never used SAS but seen a mSAS card that can connect 16 sata drives but don't know how that works out.

An HBA is what you want, but you really just shouldn't do this. The cost in electricity, and the hassle of the setup just wouldn't make much sense IMO. No, electricity costs are not that high, but neither are harddrives...

 

I could see use for the SSD's, throw the 240's in your main PC in RAID 0 as a game drive or something...

 

What OS does your current NAS run? That would seriously determine the feasibility of this anyways. 

[Zebriah]

9 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

An HBA is what you want, but you really just shouldn't do this. The cost in electricity, and the hassle of the setup just wouldn't make much sense IMO. No, electricity costs are not that high, but neither are harddrives...

 

I could see use for the SSD's, throw the 240's in your main PC in RAID 0 as a game drive or something...

 

What OS does your current NAS run? That would seriously determine the feasibility of this anyways. 

I'm using FreeNAS. I know that HDD's are pretty cheap and this would be a lot of work for a bit more than 6tb of storage added considering my 4 drives is 10tb alone (4tb, 3tb, and 2x 1.5tb). But I'm a bit of a file hoarder so until I can slowly replace them with 4tb drives (wife limits me, lol) I'd just like to have it.

[LIGISTX]

42 minutes ago, Zebriah said:

I'm using FreeNAS. I know that HDD's are pretty cheap and this would be a lot of work for a bit more than 6tb of storage added considering my 4 drives is 10tb alone (4tb, 3tb, and 2x 1.5tb). But I'm a bit of a file hoarder so until I can slowly replace them with 4tb drives (wife limits me, lol) I'd just like to have it.

It may be to late, but I would recommend unraid for your use case… Freenas is really not well suited for what is effectively a JBOD type setup, if you have so many different sized drives you must have them each in their own vdev… and thus no redundancy at all. ZFS works really really hard to retain data integrity, but it can’t do that if you don’t let it.

 

Thats why unraid is “easier”, since you can much more easily just throw discs at the system and it will easily extend the volume, with parity as well. 

[Chris Pratt]

It's worth noting too that all the 120GB and 240GB drives are probably junk, anyways. Those aren't really produced any longer, especially the 120GB, and they're inherently slow because they pretty much all just have one chip of NAND flash. Also, SSDs have a defined lifetime measure in TBW (terabytes written). SSDs that size are inherently cheap, and usually old technology, so they're going to have low TBWs to start, and having been used, are probably near dead anyways.