Define affordable
datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
Fair question, difficult to answer.
I bought the Deep Silence around $180. So maybe $250 or so/less? Flexible. Definitely not Storinator prices (though I wish they sold the chassis separate).
At that price, your only real option is to get lucky on eBay with an old supermicro rack mount chassis.
Did you have something else in mind?
The fractal design 7 xl might give you what you want, but at $200 + 5x drive cage kits at $20 each + upgrading and maxing out the fans ~$100, you're looking at closer to $400, and there are mixed reviews on how well it can keep your drives cool.
Once you get above 10-12 drives, you're going to need to look at enterprise gear, or building a custom solution. There just isn't much consumer hardware at that level.
Ah yeah, that's not bad. I do get that this is a fairly niche idea so paying extra was expected. $400 isn't outside the realm of idea. Thanks! Its the big, $1k+ server case costs that was worrying me.
I have a 12 drive setup in a define 7 (not xl) and it's working fine. As long as I keep the filters decently clean from dust the temps are fine.
Can you say what those temps are?
Around 40C
I'm putting this here because I couldn't find a good summary anywhere else on the Internet:
There hasn't been much work on this recently, but a summary of the scholarly work in this field can be found between these sources:
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Failure trends in a large disk drive population (2007)
- Findings: annual failure rates seem to not depend on temperature at all between about 30°C and 45°C, with failure rates increasing both above and below that temperature range.
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Datacenter Scale Evaluation of the Impact of Temperature on Hard Disk Drive Failures (2013)
- Findings: annual failure rates seem to scale linearly with average drive temperature, roughly doubling from 5% at 32°C to 10% at 43°C. Variation in drive temperature seems to have a small, but negligible, negative effect.
-
Hard Drive Temperature—Does It Matter? (2014)
- Findings: Temperature seems to have no effect on annual failure rates, but average temperatures of drives in study were between 21°C and 31°C, so their conclusions are not that helpful.
The 2013 paper unfortunately is stuck behind a paywall, but message me if you would like to read it.
My suggestion given the work in the field would be to keep temperatures around 30°C if you can because at higher temperatures, you could be reducing the lifespan of your drives.
Their website says a max of 18 HDDs and 5 SSDs in the storage layout. I have the R5 and am pretty happy with it.
You need to obtain the drive bays separately though.
fractal design meshify 2 xl
Have you looked at PCPartPicker with it's filters? There's only a few full atx cases with that many drive slots.
The problem that I find is that most cases only say they support x drives, but with some additional (official) drive cages can support more, but stuff like PC Part Picker doesn't show that, so hard to search that way.
I would put that in your original post next time. It's hard to know what kind of things to recommend if we don't know what you have already looked at. Knowing that there are standard ways of increasing drive count (such as the 4x drive pay you are using now). You can search by internal drive count and reduce your search significantly.
That said I think the fractal design 7 xl looks good.
I got an old atx case off craigslist with 9 5.25” hotswap bays and put in 3x 5bay hotswap cages in the front. plenty of room for the smaller SSDs inside
Came with a free i5 system and a 1050ti I use for transcoding.
Can you get bigger drives instead? So you have to use fewer of them?
all casez can fit that if you try hard enough
This was my thought as well. Most cases could fit 14 hdds and 3 ssds if you don't put anything else in them and don't actually mount the drives to racks/bays.
And nobody in their right minds would set up such a system.
This looks like a good(?) way to have lots of drives connected to one machine: https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs/wiki/Real-World-Deployments I don't have any experience like this, I have the CS380 with standard loadout... just thought it was a funny way to add lots more drives.