Increasing storage

[UtahDeLorean]

I recently upgraded to Unraid PRO

 

I currently have a 12 bay rack mount Roswell case that I have upgraded all of the drive bays into Hot swap bays.

All of this is running on a AMD threadripper 2950, 32gigs of DDR4 3200 ram

 

I recently swapped out my cache drive for NVM drive and will be adding 2 more as a cache pool

 

I have been replacing drives that are smaller then 4tb with 10tb drives and now have a cache of 3tb or smaller drives and since I have upgraded to PRO I would like to add more drives to my setup.

Since I don't have more space in my current case I would like to know if something like this  https://www.newegg.com/hp-m6720/p/1A0-001P-00GB5

would work to add drives to my setup. I am guessing that I would connect them both via a cable?

 

Or would it be better to purchase another case like this https://www.newegg.com/norco-rpc-4224/p/N82E16811219038?&quicklink=true

I would imagine that at sometime I am going to max out the number of drives that the pro version will accept.

 

Looking for the best upgrade path and I am sure there is someone that would have the best solution.

[UtahDeLorean]

What would be my best solution?

[Energen]

Your "best" solution would be to minimize the number of pieces of hardware involved and use the largest capacity drives possible in one case. 

 

Your second best solution would be to actually examine if you need that much capacity to begin with.

 

If both of those options fail then you could use a secondary case such as either of those, and to my knowledge (no direct experience with) use a SAS cable to a SAS expander card in your Unraid server.  The exact details of what cabling is required and how to go about that option is beyond my knowledge, but there are people here that run a system like that.

[UtahDeLorean]

Well I am currently at 43.5Tb and increasing. I have all 12 bays filled with drives and I am going to have a 3 Nvm drive cache array here shortly.

I have at least 10 drives ranging from 500 gig to 2tb that I could add to Unraid.

 

Currently I am using up 69% of my storage... I have been replacing my drives with 10tb drives, but at the rate it seems like I am consuming that storage I see the long term need to add more drives then just the 12 that I have now