Turning an old shit 1U server in to a slightly less shit old 1U server Upgrading Storage on an SFF only 1U enterprise box without mortgaging my kidney or firstborn child.

[Beomus]

This is an old HP dl360p i got for 20 bucks from my country's equivalent of craigslist. There are several problems with this machine, the most pressing being storage.
It's pretty cheap to get the best in class CPUs this thing can take off of aliexpress, and getting DDR3 ECC isn't exactly that hard either.
But upgrading the storage, has been a pain in my ass. It only takes 2.5 inch drives, and is currently filled with 9 SAS drives that are all ancient and tiny.

So far, here are the best ideas i've been able to come up with:
1) Fill it with the cheapest 2.5 inch SSDs in RAID5, and pray to god that they don't all fail at the same time (unlikely)

2) Fill it with cheap seagate barracuda laptop drives and pray to god that they only fail one at a time, but not in like a month (slightly better than option 1)

3) This is so far the best idea i've had. Take all the internal drives out, maybe use 2 SATA SSDs in RAID1 as a boot drive, and use some SATA/SAS extention cables to connect some cheap 3.5 inch drives to the internal drive ports. The only thing i'd be worried about is being able to power all the big drives off of the internal backplane. I could custom print an external drive cage and just mount it under the server in my IKEA Lack Rack Enterprise™ (as pictured below). One benefit would be increased airflow, due to there not being a bunch of drives in the way. If i can do this without it throttling my transfer speeds or something else stupid. I'm going to.
I want to avoid using an HBA and a powered external drive cage, because i'm trying to pull this off on a broke college student budget, and every dollar and watt counts.
Any Ideas?

 

[mkv]

i know, the struggle is real. what i would do is i would go with 2 RAID1 SSDs and just fill up the rest with 2.5" cheap RAID6 HDDs. if you wanna use different size drives just go with Unraid or similar for the HDDs, so you can use the 2 biggest drives for parity.

 

[Xeraser]

how much storage do you already have and how much do you need?
1tb mx500s are like 83€ (and 4tb ones are llike 440) on amazon right now, if you need moderately fast storage i'd say just slap a bunch of them together in whichever raid you like. dunno about US prices but they're probably similar.
you can fill the rest with 2.5s but between wd and seagate it's a pick your poison situation, all i can tell you is that at least in my experience i've never had a wd HDD fail while the seagate video HDDs i tried to put in raid 0 shit the bed after 400mb? get written to them and the entire enclosure freaks out
but they seem fine in raid 1

 

[Beomus]

i know, the struggle is real. what i would do is i would go with 2 RAID1 SSDs and just fill up the rest with 2.5" cheap RAID6 HDDs. if you wanna use different size drives just go with Unraid or similar for the HDDs, so you can use the 2 biggest drives for parity.

Click to shrink...

The only problem with that, is that it would most likely involve using 2tb seagate barracuda drives. Which... aren't exactly known for lasting long when they're powered on 24/7..
From what i've read, a lot of the ST3000DM drives are built to expect normal desktop/gaming use. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 55tb of data per year. I am going to be pushing them a lot further than that, and really don't want to be replacing drives that cost like 200 bucks a throw too often.

 

[Beomus]

how much storage do you already have and how much do you need?
1tb mx500s are like 83€ (and 4tb ones are llike 440) on amazon right now, if you need moderately fast storage i'd say just slap a bunch of them together in whichever raid you like. dunno about US prices but they're probably similar.
you can fill the rest with 2.5s but between wd and seagate it's a pick your poison situation, all i can tell you is that at least in my experience i've never had a wd HDD fail while the seagate video HDDs i tried to put in raid 0 shit the bed after 400mb? get written to them and the entire enclosure freaks out
but they seem fine in raid 1

Click to shrink...

Currently it's got 9x 15k RPM 146GB SAS drives, RAID5'd for just a little over a terabyte.
In short: not enough.

I'm really not keen on using SSDs as the main storage. It's been my experience that SSD RAID arrays are like playing Russian roulette, but instead of there being 6 chambers and 1 bullet, there's 6 chambers and 5 bullets. I've seen examples where all the SSDs in a RAID5 or RAID6 failed at once, and if it wasn't for HDD Backups, they would have been fuarked.

If i could find a way to put like 3-4 4TB Ironwolf drives in this thing, that would be great. If I take my time sourcing drives at good prices, I could slowly buy some exos drives one at at a time, and have more storage then I knew what to do with. Basically, if i can get this thing to drive 3 or 4 LFF drives, that would be all I need.

 

[Xeraser]

Currently it's got 9x 15k RPM 146GB SAS drives, RAID5'd for just a little over a terabyte.
In short: not enough.

I'm really not keen on using SSDs as the main storage. It's been my experience that SSD RAID arrays are like playing Russian roulette, but instead of there being 6 chambers and 1 bullet, there's 6 chambers and 5 bullets. I've seen examples where all the SSDs in a RAID5 or RAID6 failed at once, and if it wasn't for HDD Backups, they would have been fuarked.

If i could find a way to put like 3-4 4TB Ironwolf drives in this thing, that would be great. If I take my time sourcing drives at good prices, I could slowly buy some exos drives one at at a time, and have more storage then I knew what to do with. Basically, if i can get this thing to drive 3 or 4 LFF drives, that would be all I need.

Click to shrink...

hmm i've never had a problem with ssd raids failing except that one time i tried to connect my apfs raid 0 to windows with the appropriate paragon drivers but i never had them reading and writing 24h except for those hellish 48 hours i spent with diskdrill

honestly the best choice would be to get a different rack at this point, do you have a use for the Xeon and ecc ram or is it just a NAS? if it's the latter you could get something like a das enclosure, the 8tb IronWolf drives, a sbc like a lattepanda and call it a day tbh
i had two of them in a tr-002 while i was rescuing my raid but now they're in my desktop
they're really good but they're really
REALLY LOUD (they were also loud as fuck in the enclosure)

or you could use extension cables but where are you gonna put the drives?

 

[Beomus]

hmm i've never had a problem with ssd raids failing except that one time i tried to connect my apfs raid 0 to windows with the appropriate paragon drivers but i never had them reading and writing 24h except for those hellish 48 hours i spent with diskdrill

honestly the best choice would be to get a different rack at this point, do you have a use for the Xeon and ecc ram or is it just a NAS? if it's the latter you could get something like a das enclosure, the 8tb IronWolf drives, a sbc like a lattepanda and call it a day tbh
i had two of them in a tr-002 while i was rescuing my raid but now they're in my desktop
they're really good but they're really
REALLY LOUD (they were also loud as fuck in the enclosure)

or you could use extension cables but where are you gonna put the drives?

Click to shrink...

I absolutely have a use for the xeons. This is not just a nas.
I'm not just going to get another rack, this is being done on a uni student budget. Nothing here is mission critical, and the acceptable level of jankiness is very very high.
I reckon i'm just going to run the extension cables from the internal drive bays to a custom printed enclosure mounted under the main server. The only problem might be getting 12V power for the 3.5 inch drives? but i've aleady ordered 1 cable to test it out.

Maybe I even put the RAID contrroller into HBA mode and just use ZFS.
Turning the nice raid card and internal backplane into the most bubba-fucked JBOD setup complete with 3d printed parts mounted on a fucking ikea table. I actually like that idea purely because of how fucking cursed it is, and the fact that it might actually work.

 

[Xeraser]

I absolutely have a use for the xeons. This is not just a nas.
I'm not just going to get another rack, this is being done on a uni student budget. Nothing here is mission critical, and the acceptable level of jankiness is very very high.
I reckon i'm just going to run the extension cables from the internal drive bays to a custom printed enclosure mounted under the main server. The only problem might be getting 12V power for the 3.5 inch drives? but i've aleady ordered 1 cable to test it out.

Maybe I even put the RAID contrroller into HBA mode and just use ZFS.
Turning the nice raid card and internal backplane into the most bubba-fucked JBOD setup complete with 3d printed parts mounted on a fucking ikea table. I actually like that idea purely because of how fucking cursed it is, and the fact that it might actually work.

Click to shrink...

well hey if that ends up working more power to you
to me it just looks like a sunken cost situation... and the cost is 20 bucks