Hello c/homelab!
My NAS currently consists of 6TB of spinning rust, one disk only. As time goes on I increasingly think about how annoying it would be to lose it to a random drive failure.
So, I recently had an idea for a new storage setup when I saw a 2TB M.2 drive for £60-70 online. Given the low price, these drives are likely low-quality and probably cacheless too, but I have a potential solution: If I bought 4 of these and set them up in RAID10, would that be a sensible way to effectively double the speed and increase redundancy?
Yes, I know it’s probably a silly idea when I can just spend more on 2 faster and more reliable drives, but I would like to at least hear from people who might have tried something similar! So what do you think?
Never tried a build withe M.2 drives, but unless you have a workload that actually needs that kind of speed, SATA SSDs might be better bang for the buck (especially if those m.2 drives aren’t nvme). If you’re just storing media or something, hard drives are probably still the way to go.
I picked M.2 because of the compact size as I’m also looking to reduce the physical size of the box, and also to reduce the noise and energy footprint (so spinning disks are out). SATA SSDs could still work, as the RAID idea can still apply to those too. I’d just have to find a better deal on them than the M.2 ones.
Gotcha. If the m.2 is cheaper (and consider additional HBAs or Adapters or chassis you’d need), then I’d go m.2 still. Just figured SATA might be a little more straightforward and is typically cheaper. Seems reasonable enough.
My plan is to, if possible, get a cheap-ish mini-PC with a low-power (but still reasonably capable) CPU like a 10700T or something with a PCIe slot. I’d then buy a PCIe riser cable and a card with extra M.2/SATA ports (depending on which drives I decide on). Next I’d design and 3D print an enclosure for whichever extra drives I buy, plus the card, to be mounted onto the mini-PC. “Quality jank” is how I’d describe it, hahaha
I would love to do this at some point! Is that your build?
Yeah, I had a simmilar Idea about silent, compact, power efficient and cheap server due to limited space in a small appartment. I had old full size atx board and atx PSU so design was around that. Available cases were expensive and/or bigger than the one I made. Its perfect for me, but it might be bad idea for servers that produce a lot of heat. If you are interested check it out LINK
Now you’re speaking my language!
I was actually looking at a business-grade SBC by Asus (I think it was part of their 4x4 lineup) that had a mobile Ryzen chip and some other decent specs, but it was unfortunately a bit too expensive for me. I also have done a bit of research into ARM-based solutions, but it’s pretty early days for cheap ARM homelab stuff.