I have around 30TB of data scattared around between cloud services, external hard drives, a small plex server, etc.
I would like start a storage server to store everything, with a bit of computing power for other task (plex as mentioned).
I'm looking on ebay at the Dell Edgeserver t330 or similar, starting with 3x 18TB drives, and since it has 8 bay, I'll have plenty of space for future upgrades. It seems have also a decent cpu, so it should handle plex and some other tasks without issues.
My concerns is about noise; it is going to be put under a desk in my lab and not inside a rack, I saw some videos on youtube and it doesnt seem too noisy, but hard to tell from a video. And for power usage, it will run mostly at idle I think, so I dont think it will drink too much.
Do you think it make sense? Any suggestion?
As said, the only hard requirements are quite a bit disk spaces for future expansion (6x-8x 3.5 drive support) a decent cpu, and doesnt have to be too noisy.
I've also evaluated buying a parts a built it from scratch, using like the new intel n100 with is very powerful with low power usage, a big case and so on for a similar price.
Check out serverbuilds.net. They are good guides on building a good NAS with used parts from ebay. I have build at least 3 servers using their guides over the years.
The current gen processors are hilariously efficient if you build the rest the system properly. I will warn you that the low watt rabbit hole gets crazy. Simply changing a component from one slot to another can make a large difference on idle power draw. https://mattgadient.com/7-watts-idle-on-intel-12th-13th-gen-the-foundation-for-building-a-low-power-server-nas/ is a nice write up on a low power build that lists some of the things to consider when it comes to power usage and CPU idle states. At this point, I would stay away from server hardware unless you have a specific reason to run it. It may be cheap to buy at first, but you end up paying a lot more in the long run on power usage. I would also recommended you look at unraid. It has a somewhat proprietary raid format that does the parity calculations on the file level and not the block level. The result is that unraid is able to keep drives spun down and off much more aggressively than a traditional raid setup. It only needs to spin up the drive that has the file and not the whole disk pack.
Do you by chance have an opinion on Snapraid? The fact that I can easily add more drives to my pool down the road is a BIG win for me, and I can deal with the lost performance from not using "classic" Raid - but I'm not yet super sure if SR is stable and all.
I do not. I think unraid supports adding arbitrary numbers and sizes of drives, but the largest drive is always the parity drive. Under the hood I think unraid is just mergefs or something. If you really want to roll your own Linux thing and have the same functionally you can, but the management is a lot harder. I am in the arm chair engineering stages of the next iteration of storage in my homelab so I will definitely check out snapraid.
For the server setup I would use a dedicated sata or SAS card. They are more reliable and add flexibility.
For operating systems I would go with Truenas on bare metal or Proxmox with PCI passthough to the PCI sata card to a truenas VM. ZFS and therefore truenas benefit from lots of ram and a multi core CPU. With your 3 hard drives I would get a 6 core CPU and at least 32gb of ram. More ram would be better.
I have no idea what your budget is but this setup isn't cheap
Yeah, thats also a good point. I'm trying to keep low budget, and since the disks alone will cost around 600-700 eur, I'm trying to stay under 300 eur for the rest of the system, thats why i'm looking at the user server equipment
Have you thought about building your own? You build a server out of a case like this IN WIN. What OS do you plan to use? Do you need Windows share ability? Are you willing to go with larger SSDs instead of spinning disks? If you give me some more details, I might be able to help you. I am not a fan of Dell.
I’m currently using a dell precision t7920, can hold up to ten 3.5 drives, has too many pcie slots, dual Xeon silver cpus. I had it running for about a year now, 24/7, in my living room, it’s in my rack now, and you can’t even tell it’s there. The poweredge series might be different when it comes to fan curves, but I can’t imagine it would be too different.