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Are Disk Shelves Worth It? (alien.top)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm looking to buy some 20tb drives to upgrade my NAS. It currently hosts a 12x3tb striped mirror setup on Truenas Scale plugged into a NetApp DS4246 24 bay. It is backed up elsewhere.

With how large HDDs and even SSDs are getting I would only need a mirrored 20tb pair to cover my current data and have quite a bit of open space left yet. (Like double) Eventually it will grow though. My backup uses a Rosewill case with 15bays. It seems ridiculous to only put two drives in a 24bay shelf. Even if I use another Rosewill case and put 14 drives in it, in a striped mirror setup that is 140tb.

Is it worth using the extra power of the shelf vs just a Rosewill case and some lsi cards? I wouldn't even need the lsi cards just yet. I'm contemplating selling the shelf and current drives and replacing it with 4 20tb. A mirror on the main setup and a mirror on the backup in two Rosewill cases. I do realize I lose the redundant power supplies.

(I realize that people in the data hoarder category are in a different situation but I don't plan on having 140tb of data in the near future.)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I have done both. In your case there is no point in a shelf and it just takes up extra space and power. That said there are more than a few shelf’s that only use about 25 watts empty. The LSI cards use around 10 watts. And then spinning rust uses well 5 to 10 each drive. For all the SAS card haters mother boards with lots a sata ports need extra controllers as well and the crappy ones take even more power. If you build a large drive setup disk shelf’s allow you to expand easily and without adding more motherboards which also take guess what.. power! As far as noise goes most of the shelf’s suck but some can be made to work without rocking your ears. But more power more heat more cooling.