Getting one Petabyte into one mid-tower case!

[Weak1ings]

I've been thinking about building a NAS build and in my research I encountered this product:

ICY DOCK 24 bay 2.5 inch hot swap to 3x 5.25 inch bay ($~800)

This is intriguing; in the same space that I could fit five 3.5" hard drives with some products, this fits 24 2.5" drives, this is half a magnitude higher in density!

Going a step further, any standard mid tower case with 9 5.25 inch bays could fit three of these, this makes the case capable of holding 72 2.5 inch drives! This is utter madness! (example case: Old Antec 900, though I'm sure newer ones exist.)

Using the Samsung 870 QVO 8TB 2.5 inch model would grant roughly 576TB of storage, costing ~$25,200. ($349.99 on amazon) This is a huge amount of money, but it appears to be pretty fair for SSDs.

 

But it's not done yet!

 

144 drives might be achievable by using 72 dual m.2 to 2.5 inch adapters like this one: StarTech.com S322M225R M.2 to SATA Adapter - Dual Slot this would allow for a petabyte to be stored.

At present on PcPart Picker, the cheapest m.2 2280 8TB drive costs $759.00 a piece.

This means that you could get a petabyte of storage inside of a mid-tower case for the mere cost of $109,296 in storage.

A similar drive, the MP600 PRO NH states 10.9 Watts on its webpage, so the power budget would be 1,596.6 Watts, plus overhead from all other components. This is probably the hardest to accommodate part.

 

Overall, the system would require:

• 24 SAS ports
• 2000 Watt PSU (guessing on overhead)
• 144 8TB M.2 drives
• Mid Tower Case
• A budget of $120,000 (rough estimate)

To get:

1,152 TB of storage maximum.

 

What do you think of this?

 

It seems like it could work and with the power issue resolved it might be a really interesting video!

 

Edit:

I realized a much cheaper option exists here, this is not SAS which could make it pretty difficult to troubleshoot cable issues.

Athena Power BP-15827SAC

[Crunchy Dragon]

-Moved to Storage Devices-

20 minutes ago, Weak1ings said:

mere cost of $109,296 in storage

Oh good, I was worried it would be expensive.

 

As far as covering power goes, you would be very hard-pressed to find a PSU with enough wattage, or a mid tower ATX that supports multiple PSUs. I like the idea, but I can't shake the feeling that you're nearing, if not already at the point where you'd be better off in a rackmounted chassis for this kind of venture.

[Weak1ings]

22 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

-Moved to Storage Devices-

Oh good, I was worried it would be expensive.

 

As far as covering power goes, you would be very hard-pressed to find a PSU with enough wattage, or a mid tower ATX that supports multiple PSUs. I like the idea, but I can't shake the feeling that you're nearing, if not already at the point where you'd be better off in a rackmounted chassis for this kind of venture.

Definitely, especially power on the correct rails! I imagine someone could ad-hoc a mid tower to fit two psus easily enough, but a server chassis is much better here.

This is well past the practical point of using a server chassis, I think all of this would best fit inside a 3U case that has 9 5.25 inch bays as well, 2U if the user does not need hotswapping but that's makes maintaining 144 drives annoying.

 

One of the best parts of all of this is the flexibility 5.25 inch bays offer this kind of setup! Getting to turn any case into a readily accessible hot-swappable server could be a pretty powerful feature, making dedicated nas cases like the excellent Jonsbo N2 or N3 less attractive. At the previously mentioned rate, that is 96 TB per 5.25 inch bay using today's drives, imagining what the future holds is really exciting for this.

[manikyath]

the 16-bay version of that thing was reviewed somewhere (servethehome iirc) and the conclusion was that:

- it does not make sense to have that many SATA SSD's

- it cannot hold spinning rust, because the bays are too slim

- there is no single HBA that can handle that much I/O

- the budgetting.. is so insane it actually solidly puts you into the range of MUCH better solutions

 

and your hair-brained idea is applying that to the 24-bay version and including 24 shady-ass sata splitter chipets, and somehow expecting that array to have any sort of stability?

 

this is not a good video idea, this is a good way to lose anything you store on it.

[Blue4130]

9 hours ago, Weak1ings said:

Definitely, especially power on the correct rails! I imagine someone could ad-hoc a mid tower to fit two psus easily enough, but a server chassis is much better here.

This is well past the practical point of using a server chassis, I think all of this would best fit inside a 3U case that has 9 5.25 inch bays as well, 2U if the user does not need hotswapping but that's makes maintaining 144 drives annoying.

 

One of the best parts of all of this is the flexibility 5.25 inch bays offer this kind of setup! Getting to turn any case into a readily accessible hot-swappable server could be a pretty powerful feature, making dedicated nas cases like the excellent Jonsbo N2 or N3 less attractive. At the previously mentioned rate, that is 96 TB per 5.25 inch bay using today's drives, imagining what the future holds is really exciting for this.

If you want density, and $100k is the kind of budget you throw around, then switch to e3l ruler ssd's. 30tb per stick. 1 petabyte in a 1u server. The io is going to be way better than sata ssd's.

[Weak1ings]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

If you want density, and $100k is the kind of budget you throw around, then switch to e3l ruler ssd's. 30tb per stick. 1 petabyte in a 1u server. The io is going to be way better than sata ssd's.

Any idea what those ruler drives cost? Seems like a much better idea than this. (not that I was ever actually considering this lol)

[Blue4130]

6 hours ago, Weak1ings said:

Any idea what those ruler drives cost? Seems like a much better idea than this. (not that I was ever actually considering this lol)

Lots. They are enterprise gear, which is always expensive.