I have around 30TB of data scattared around between cloud services, external hard drives, a small plex server, etc.

I would like start a storage server to store everything, with a bit of computing power for other task (plex as mentioned).

I’m looking on ebay at the Dell Edgeserver t330 or similar, starting with 3x 18TB drives, and since it has 8 bay, I’ll have plenty of space for future upgrades. It seems have also a decent cpu, so it should handle plex and some other tasks without issues.

My concerns is about noise; it is going to be put under a desk in my lab and not inside a rack, I saw some videos on youtube and it doesnt seem too noisy, but hard to tell from a video. And for power usage, it will run mostly at idle I think, so I dont think it will drink too much.

Do you think it make sense? Any suggestion?

As said, the only hard requirements are quite a bit disk spaces for future expansion (6x-8x 3.5 drive support) a decent cpu, and doesnt have to be too noisy.

I’ve also evaluated buying a parts a built it from scratch, using like the new intel n100 with is very powerful with low power usage, a big case and so on for a similar price.

  • Possibly linux
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    1 year ago

    I would look into consumer cases.

    For the server setup I would use a dedicated sata or SAS card. They are more reliable and add flexibility.

    For operating systems I would go with Truenas on bare metal or Proxmox with PCI passthough to the PCI sata card to a truenas VM. ZFS and therefore truenas benefit from lots of ram and a multi core CPU. With your 3 hard drives I would get a 6 core CPU and at least 32gb of ram. More ram would be better.

    I have no idea what your budget is but this setup isn’t cheap

    • @sx44OP
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      11 year ago

      Yeah, thats also a good point. I’m trying to keep low budget, and since the disks alone will cost around 600-700 eur, I’m trying to stay under 300 eur for the rest of the system, thats why i’m looking at the user server equipment