Please take a look at the build that i am thinking of. it is a bit out of my price range i would prefer not to spend more than $3,500.00 i plan to grown the storage amount as time goes and i am planing to run Plex Media Server in a docker. but the transcoding will never be over 3 at the same time.

Custom Storinator Configuration from 45Drives -- Q30 - Base.pdf

If you can find a 36bay Supermicro chassis on eBay with a SAS2 backplane, you'll spend far less and have a server with only 9 less drives than the 45 bay one.

way too much money.

The more drives the more points of failure. Since 10TB drives are common now even 20 drives will give 200TB. Do you really need that many drives?

 

Do you know that unRAID will let you expand by replacing any drive with a larger drive? Unlike traditional RAID, unRAID doesn't require all drives to be the same size. Just requires that no single data drive be larger than parity.

 

If you still think you need that many drives, it might make more sense to build multiple systems so you get a reasonable number of drives with dual parity per system.

Too much money. Custom build one or get a used from eBay.

Definitely overkill. Grab a used Supermicro 24-bay case from eBay for a few hundred $ and start from there. SAS expanding backplanes are okay but you will eventually saturate the 6Gbps or 12Gbps limit of them as you add more drives.  Normal unRAID use wouldn't show any problem, but parity checks will turn from hours to days long as you add more drives and don't have the full throughput available for each.

 

I stick with SATA backplanes and multiple controllers to ensure full rates to each drive, just to ensure I don't have 5-day-long parity checks like I did with my first PCI-based system.

 

If you really feel the need to cram a whack ton of physical drives into 4RU, you may wish to visit https://www.backuppods.com/  to grab a chassis from the folks who make the Backblaze pods, and go from there. Keep in mind though, if unRAID is your OS choice, your limit for data storage is basically 30 physical drives (28 data and 2 parity, and not counting cache drives).  Using more than that is likely more troublesome than helpful. 

 

I am looking for a top mount tray less solution to test HDD/SSD SATA and SAS (SATA is most important) can anyone recommend something I can use other than spending $11,000? I had a guy build me a machine with hot swap mobile caddys but they are cheap and keep burning out on me. He used an alienware board, LSI controller and installed all of this in a cabinet, it works great....when it works. Our drive testing has ramped up and I need a better solution.

Edited March 2, 20206 yr by KHP
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