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 must log in or register to comment.
I have the Silverstone GD-08 case that can fit 12 hard drives. It’s an inexpensive solution for a dedicated htpc/media server. Even managed to fit in an RX 6600 so my wife can play low spec games on the tv.
Then all you need is a pcie expansion card as others suggested.
That’s a great suggestion, thank you! I looked at a few cases with more drive space but didn’t see any this inexpensive.
I use a Fractal Design Define R6 but their newer model is around the same price (it actually appears to be $60 cheaper than the Silverstone case on NewEgg) and can hold the same number of drives. They’re solid cases.
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/define/define-7/
For your lack of SATA ports, you can either buy a new mobo (use PCPartPicker and filter by SATA ports) or an LSI SAS HBA card to gain additional SATA ports.
I didn’t know that case could fit that many drives! I’m a fan of Fractal Designs cases, have used and recommended them for a few gaming PCs before. Thanks for the recommendation!
Yeah it only comes with 6 trays, so you’ll need to order more, but you can fill out the entire front section with drives.
If you have a free PCIE slot, you can just get a SATA controller card.
I see other’s talk about an m.2 -> SATA adapter, but I just don’t see the point if you have a free PCIE slot
I wasn’t aware of these! I’ll need to check when I have a chance, but I’m fairly sure there’s an open slot, thanks!
A thing you may not be aware of, which is nifty, is the M.2 -> SATA adapters.
They work well enough for consumer use, and they’re a reasonably cheap way of adding another 4-6 SATA ports.
And, bonus, you don’t need to add the heat/power and complexity of some decade old HBA to the mix, which is a solution I’ve grown to really, really, dislike.
If you’re not worried about the desktop’s age or ability, you can just expand the array by growing the volume with bigger drives.
You don’t want to run raid on a DAS unless it for some reason handles it’s own, and then you might as well just get a NAS.
If you’re simply looking for more disk slots, you could rebuild and transfer your array into another machine, but then you’re probably back to NAS being a cheaper option.
Have you considered setting up a virtual drive throuh RCLONE and use encrypted cloud storage?
As others have said, running out of motherboard SATA slots doesn’t mean you need a new machine to support expansion.
You can get m2 adapter slots for more SATA drives.
If you think you’ll be building a NAS in the future, and are cheap like I am, you might consider getting a pci-e expansion card for SAS rather than SATA drives. They’re backwards compatibile with SATA drives, but open you up to being able to use SAS drives which are common in enterprise data centers. You can get used lots of those drives on eBay WAY cheaper per TB when the data centers hour them out.
I’ve got a machine with 16 SAS drives running the unRaid OS, and I’m very happy with it for data hoarding and media serving. The drives (with shipping) cost $5/TB.
I hadn’t really looked into SAS drives, but that sounds like a great option. $5/TB is awesome!
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?
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:
I was asking just about power, but those bays will come in handy as I haven’t been able to get a new case yet, thanks for sharing!
A second power supply does currently seem like the best option. In my research I found Super Flower’s modular power supplies, which can apparently power a ton of drives
For the molex to SATA splitters, did you need to get one specifically wired for your PSU?
I’d never looked at them before, but yeah that super flower super modular supply looks pretty sweet. It looks like it has a ton of ports that I assume can be wired up as whatever you need.
For me, the splitters were just generic: they plug to an existing molex out connector and give you 5 SATAs on a ribbon.
https://a.co/d/gXtQ3Qp is what I’d bought, just for reference. The power supply I used them with wasn’t modular (ancient) and so whatever it had was what there was.
Maybe I misread, but if you are planning on having two different PSUs in play for the same system, it’s my understanding that it’s important to make sure the DC outputs share a common ground, which might be a little extra wiring.
Hopefully I can find the molex cables that came with my PSU, I know I have them somewhere.
Thanks for the tip about grounding, was not aware of that. I’ll either be getting a second PSU or upgrading to one of those Super Flower ones, depending on how the costs work out. I just remembered my GPU doesn’t need a power cable, so that should open up even more ports.
Thanks for all the advice!
