this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
15 points (94.1% liked)

Selfhosted

41617 readers
401 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud
Loki
CannaVet
devve
HybridSarcasm
[email protected]
15
Looking for advice for media server storage expansion (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I currently have a pretty simple media server. It runs on a desktop made of old parts and has 4 6 TB drives in a raidz1 array. It is used by a lot of friends who add a lot of media, so its been nearly at capacity for a while. The desktop has no more open SATA ports or drive enclosures, so I'm not sure what the best option for adding more drives is.

I know the most obvious answer is buying NAS, but I think it might be a little complex for what I need, because no other devices need any access to this storage. I was considering purchasing a DAS, as it seems like a simple option, but I've seen many people say its not worth purchasing a DAS over a NAS. Any opinions would be appreciated.

Edit: Thanks for the suggestions! I'm likely going to go with a new case for some extra drive bays and a PCI-E SAS controller, this seems like the best option for the simplicity and price!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Hey, thanks to your suggestion I got 8 SAS drives and a PCI-e SAS expansion card, but I've realized there's something I didn't really consider. How are you powering your drives? After my upgrade, my server will contain 12 drives, which my PSU unfortunately does not provide enough ports for. Is simply upgrading it the best option in your opinion?

[–] Windex007 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Depending on how power hungry the drives are, and if your PSU has enough spare power, you can get cable splitters. I had some spare molex ports which I plugged a cable from Amazon that split it into 5 SATA power connectors.

You don't want to infinitely split cables though, as tempting as that can be, because there are real electrical limits to doing that. Also just because a power supply is rated at X watts, that's the total. Hard drives will use the 5V and 12V rails and usually there are individual limits on each rail.

Upgrading the PSU is another option. Probably the cleanest easiest best solution IMO. But even then, you probably can't find a PSU that'll give you 12 SATA connectors out of the box so you'll probably need some splitters in there anyways.

In my case specifically, I've actually got a second power supply (because i already had it and it was otherwise just gathering dust) powering the extra drives. It's a bit more complicated to get set up but, it's an option as well.

Edit: also if you're asking yourself where can you physically PUT the drives, I 3D printed these and slapped some fans on them:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4875498