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?
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.