Rackmount storage

Gibraltar · May 28, 2018

Hi,

This could either be a really simple question that I could've figured out with a bit of googling or completely ridiculous.

I like the look of rackmounted equipment, I plan to buy a case to rackmount my pc and I'd like to have rackmounted storage, I think a NAS may be the answer to my problem, but despite google, I dont really understand what they do, yay for me.

What I want is this, a bunch of harddrives/ storage space to rackmount, something I can throw maybe 10 tb worth of harddrives into, which run independent of each other so, some hold my excess data, and some i can use to backup to using my preferred backing up software. If you need a deeper explanation I'm willing to try and explain further, but I may struggle with it.

So thank you for your info to help.

jj9987 · May 28, 2018

Rackmount equipment is heavy, does not have noise-isolation (and they use quite powerful/loud fans mostly, though these can be replaced) and often more expensive.

NAS is a storage server, that you connect to your local area network and all devices in that network can then connect to that server. I highly suggest running a redundant disk array there (RAID 5 for example) to avoid data loss in scenarios where one of the drives dies.

When using NAS, you do not put the data on the disk directly. Your OS (be that FreeNAS, unRAID, plain Ubuntu or whatever) has access to disks and you export shares (imagine them as folders). These shares are used over all disks. When you copy a file to the share, the OS copies the file to one of the disks (usually depending on which has most free space, but that's OT for now). You do not have to worry, which disk has the file, you only need to know the share name.

What question(s) do you have exactly? What information do you seek?

wojtepanik · May 28, 2018

10tb is like 1 drive, are you sure you need a rack mount for this ?

Christophe Corazza · May 29, 2018

On 28-5-2018 at 10:03 AM, Gibraltar said:

What I want is this, a bunch of harddrives/ storage space to rackmount, something I can throw maybe 10 tb worth of harddrives into, which run independent of each other so, some hold my excess data, and some i can use to backup to using my preferred backing up software. If you need a deeper explanation I'm willing to try and explain further, but I may struggle with it.

That's totally possible. You can have such a setup at home fairly easy.

However, as mentioned before, you would benifit more from a dedicated NAS system rather than your proposed setup.