Hello everyone! I've been on Unraid for a while now (almost a year), and I've been using my Unraid server solely for Plex (although I'm wanting to add Calibre to it so I can have access to my ebooks from anywhere). The problem I have run into is I've converted about a quarter of all of my movies and TV shows from disc to digital, and I'm almost out of hard drive space with no room to add additional drives.

 

I don't want to add a DAS which would just add extra mass to my s[ace, so I'm considering upgrading to a 24+ hot swap bay rack server chassis. The Supermicro chassis' seem to be popular, but I wanted to get some opinions from people a bit more experienced than I am. I have only ever used towers, so I'm a bit out of my element when it comes to rack servers. Here are my specs (which I know is completely overkill for what I'm using it for):

 

• Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390M Gaming Edge AC LGA1151
• CPU: Intel i7-9700k
• RAM: Corsair LPX 32GB (2x16GB) 3200MHz C16 DDR4
• Cache Drive: Samsung 970 PRO SSD 1TB (NVMe)
• Hard Drives: Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD (x8)
• HBA: LSI Logic SAS 9207-8i Storage Controller LSI00301
• Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock 4

 

I think that's all of the important specs. I'm going to have to massively increase the number of hard drives I have (as in triple or quadruple them), so I figured a minimum of 24 hot swap bays on the server is what I would want. Does anyone have recommendations for me on what chassis I should look at? From what I understand some chassis' have better backplanes than others, and I take it to understand that backplane takes the place of my HBA. If I'm misinformed please let me know. Sorry if this sounds silly to you guys, but we all have to start somewhere, right?

If you can find it anywhere the SilverStone cases are nice and the RM420 is a 20 bay hot swap.  A quick peek looked like it's not available anywhere right now.  You're going to pay a shiny penny for a hot swap case of that size.

 

The backplane connects the drives nicely and then from the backplane you still need your HBA for all the SAS connectors.

 

Here's a simple diagram that shows you what I mean..

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sas-storage,1239-6.html

 

Thanks for the info on the HBA. Having never worked with servers before I wasn't aware it would require the HBA still. I looked into the SilverStone server chassis', but it looks like the largest one they have is the 20-bay one that you listed. I am going to need a minimum of 24 bays, so I don't think that brand will work for me.

I found a fairly cheap Supermicro case with 36 hot swap bays!

 

SC847E16-R1K28LPB

 

So far it's working great. The only issue I had was the case fans. With this being one giant Plex server the seven very high RPM fans (they idle around 4,000 RPM each) were completely unnecessary, and unbearably loud. For now I have removed all seven fans entirely. I'm monitoring temps and so far the hard drives are fine (they are sitting between 40 and 45 degrees). The CPU, however, is moving between 50 to 65 degrees with only a 5% to 10% load. That's to be expected since I don't have air being pushed through the case anymoreanymore. I ordered seven Noctua NF-A8 fans that I'll be swapping into the Supermicro fan-housing units. Those should get here in two days. Since my CPU load doesn't get over 20% (and it rarely even hits that) I think I should be okay with no case fans at all until the quieter fans get here.