I ran through what this would look like last night after I decided to put in a $20 offer on a SFF office PC and went "... oh shit what would I do with it". Thankfully, the offer was not accepted.
But it was too late.
There's no one I could even build this FOR right now for cost of parts. So I'm gonna walk through it here. Keep in mind this is a "I want to spend the LEAST amount of money possible" kind of setup and it's a little, ramshackle. You'll see.
Pricing and availability based on what's here in the US. Sorry.
After seeing this post from Plum I was inspired to actually do this. (BECAUSE ONE OF MY HARD DRIVES BLEW UP AND TOOK MY BEAUTIFUL MUSIC LIBRARY WITH IT)
And I am PLEASED to announce that it worked!
So now I'm gonna run down what I did and how I bodged this into happening. Then I'll tell you how much this cost me.
The first thing I did was get the PC. As far as I know it's a ThinkCentre PC320 SFF. It came with a Xeon E3-1225 v5 and 16 gigs of ECC ram. Didn't go out of my way to get this one, but it's the one I got.
For hard drives I got three 10TB HGST drives. I'm pretty sure they support a 4K sector size because they've got a little thing on the label but I'm new to NAS stuff and it likely isn't that relevant to my needs.
Did the system fit all these?
No.
I thought I could make it work. (AND I NEARLY DID) but the clearance on the empty bay just wasn't enough to accommodate the SAS connector AND the SATA power connector. Otherwise basically all of the drives are crammed in around and under the 5.25 bay (which this system came with, despite not including one). To fit the one below I had to remove the front USB and audio, as well as bending a weird support brace out of the way.
Where's the third one? Outside. I just ran the SAS connector through an empty expansion slot that had the system had occupied with a (I had to buy an 8i) card, couldn't find a 4i4e with a bracket that fit)
To stop them shorting on anything I wrapped about five rubber bands around every hard drive. (87mm x 6mm is perfect for 3.5 inch drives, for the record). This seems to have worked. I also mounted the one in the 5.25 bay upside down because there were various ominous metal protrusions I didn't like the look of.
I also had to do some pretty heavy cable management to make room for all the new stuff, so the CPU power is routed down the fan shroud and the rest is curved back on itself. Also had to get some SATA power extenders (StarTech are my go to for specific cables I don't want to light on fire, so hopefully these ain't a fire hazard).
HOW MUCH DID IT COST??
| Bits | Cost |
|---|---|
| HGST 10 TB SAS Drive | £69.55 |
| HGST 10 TB SAS Drive | £69.55 |
| HGST 10 TB SAS Drive | £69.55 |
| SFF PC | £53.00 |
| LSI-9207 | £39.99 |
| SFF-8087 to SFF-8482 | £14.99 |
| SATA Power splitter | £9.89 |
| Rubber bands | £2.75 |
| Samsung 870 Evo | Already had |
In total, this comes to £329.27. I think that's pretty darn good for 18-ish usable terabytes of storage.
Will things eventually go wrong? Probably. That's tomorrow's problem.
To wrap things up I'd like to say thanks to @plumpan because that post saved me a lot of money lmao. I was thinking of buying an ASUStor NAS or something prior to that post and cramming some pricey drives into it. (This would have cost at least £1000 for what I was going for).
Otherwise I think that's that. Hope you enjoyed reading about my DUBIOUS NAS.
