HOW to Home server?

[Oliver davies]

I recently "acquired" 12 2Tb hard drives at a closing down office block. I have a old Pc lying around that i thought i could use as a nas with some of the drives but i am unsure how to set up lots of drive (have used free nas before but want to learn more about the hardware side of things) Do i just buy a sata Pcie card and just plug them all in?

Any tips/ ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[sazrocks]

With that many drives it may be worth it to get a raid card and put them all in raid 5.

[manikyath]

here's what i'd suggest, based on the assumption that the origin of the 12 drives is "vague", and the fact you most likely dont have much use for 10+TB worth of storage:

 

- only use half of them as "hot" storage, leave the rest as spares

- if your desktop doesnt have 7 SATA ports (one extra for the boot disk) get some cheapo sata cards to fill the gap

- download your favourite variation of freenas or similar solutions

- put the disks into a ZFS pool or similar

- ???

- profit.

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, sazrocks said:

With that many drives it may be worth it to get a raid card and put them all in raid 5.

eh. for storage pools raid is kinda old fashioned, keep raid for stuff like redundant boot drives or local storage in servers.

[Oliver davies]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

here's what i'd suggest, based on the assumption that the origin of the 12 drives is "vague", and the fact you most likely dont have much use for 10+TB worth of storage:

 

- only use half of them as "hot" storage, leave the rest as spares

- if your desktop doesnt have 7 SATA ports (one extra for the boot disk) get some cheapo sata cards to fill the gap

- download your favourite variation of freenas or similar solutions

- put the disks into a ZFS pool or similar

- ???

- profit.

Thanks i intended to sell a lot of them anyway and thanks for the idea i just wasn't sure is raid was worth is / how exactly it worked. Thanks

 

[jnic]

I would put some of them maybe 8 or 10 of them in raid one and if any fail you just swap them out with one of the others 

[geo3]

If you care about data integrity set up a backup before you consider doing any kind of RAID. Remember RAID only protects from drive failure.  File corruption, file system corruption, accidental deletion or overwrite, and virus infection are all things that RAID will not save your data from. 

 

With that many drives you could to a couple RAID 5/6  arrays and have one array as primary storage and one to store it's backup. And you could still have some left over to swap in in case of failure.   All of this is way overkill for a home server.