The first of a two part video about building a homelab network attached storage array. We will dig into the details of SAS and SATA, expanders, data rates and transfer rates, and get ready to build an array.
Never ever stop making content! This is some of the best content I've seen in the homelab space I've seen in years. I've recently been planning a big upgrade and this is exactly the content I've been looking for. Current setup is a 24 bay SM chassis running unraid. I've just recently upgraded everything in the house to 10gb available. The old server is running an older SM JBOD motherboard so I wanted to update everything. Ended up going with a Threadripper 3790X and 128GB DDR4 for the "application layer". The plan is to start the new server and run in parallel and add the first new hard drives to that machine so I can transfer all my old data over and destroy the data on my old unraid box and then I can transfer the new hardware over the 24 bay SM and have a nice new setup there. The part I was researching was changing to a distributed model for data so this video has been a gold mine for me. With how cheap you can get older SAS3 SM 45 bay JBOD chassis this seems like the best route. I'll be very interested in the topology video because I was debating between mirrored pairs or going with a Z2 or Z3 setup. I used FreeNAS back in the day so familiar with zfs but its been quite a few years since I've used it. It seems like running a ceph setup or something to be able to add nodes (or drives) horizontally makes sense for scale. I'm planning around a 1-2PB physical capacity at the moment (planning much much into the future as this is a long term plan...current setup is sitting around ~200TB).
Not many people could make SAS controller's interesting. You remind me of some of my DEC instructors who could provide a large amount of information in a short amount of time, and made one hungry for more. I'm looking forward to the next segment.
I used to use loads of SM chassis with the JBOD boards like you demonstrated. They worked OK but the backplanes became extrememly touchy with age and I got the irrits with swapping supposed failed drives. Went to EMC chassis and not a single drive since, 60x HDD's and HW RAID, simple and fast. LOL, I started out with Norco's. They still good for small users and a media server.
Thank you for clarifying all of that! I bought a SAS2 HBA thinking it would be enough bandwidth. Now i know i need a SAS3 HBA. Conveniently the case manufacturer offers a 12G replacement backplane with an internal expander to upgrade. The SAS2 HBA will then be used for a small SATA SSD array.
Can you please continue project Roscoe 🙏. It was very informative. And you mentioned FPGA in your videos, so please make video on MOSFETs sir how it works to understand the electronics better
Fantastic video. Ive been looking into building a NAS but was struggling to decide between the three configurations you outlined. This really helped clarify some of the considerations between them. Looking forward to the next in the series
So I am wondering if you can explain how would you do ssd drives and hard drives in jbods and how you would have them connected and what would be the for the best performance I am wondering because I am looking to add jbods to my home lab
200TB is what I'm sitting at on my main server right now...these videos are gold for me because I'm planning an upgrade around a 1-2PB capacity if full 🤣
@@herman6214 all mechanical. its a variety of 10TB, 14TB, and 16TB drives that I schucked over a couple years period. No clue how much total I always tried to buy them close to the holidays when they were on sale.
