I’m in exactly the same situation. Currently have a 35TB unRaid server running in a 16bay chenbro case.
Been looking for a while for something to replace it, but anything from QNAP/Synology with enough bays and power for what I require is silly money.
Quite fancy a QNAP TVS-1282 but at £2kjust seems over the top.
It depends on what you need it for. I use my Synology 8-bay purely for serving files and a couple of low power apps. It's an appliance. I switch it on (actually I rarely switch it off) and it works 24/7, it doesn't require tweaking or maintenance, it just sits there, working.
If you need to run VM's, transcode etc you'd be cheaper building your own but then you need to keep on top of it and actually know how it all works.
You don't need an i7 with 32GB of RAM just for storage, only if you're a power user.
Tough one isn't it?Looking at migrating to 10TB drives, so maintain my capacity whilst re-using my 6TB drives, I'm still looking at £1.5k I reckon....which is crazy money to replace something which still actually works fine.
What about something like 5 8TB USB3 drives hooked up to an Intel NUC? The NUC is small, enough power to do general serving duties, has 4 SS USB ports on, so you'd need a USB3 hub, but all in should cost around £750 for the drives plus £200 or so for an i5 NUC (less if you go s/h). You could have individual drives (which I find helps with the backup/restore strategy) or span the whole lot as a single drive.
Can you run unraid or something similar with that type of config?
It sounds a bit messy...6 power supplies etc...
Yeah agreed, it isn't the neatest. Never used unraid so no idea on that one.
I personally would avoid USB and external drives for this particular use case.
From my own experience, there are too many things to go wrong.I had issues with just single drives dropping on USB and as you say lots of PSUs etc.If the server drops one drive in some sort of multi-array drive then it's going to go into some sort of recovery mode and not be particularly happy.
I would be looking for a one box solution but am like you not quite sure where to go.
I have a 24 bay rackmount unit which is drawing around 80w with 18 of the drives.The logical choice would be to wack some more drives in and consolidate or remove some of the older ones.Not sure the limitations of my RAID controller card though as it is pretty old ...
Something built off the back of the Silverstone DS380 maybe.
Throw in a cheap ITX board CPU, ram etc and a LSI card and you should be good to go.Alternatively you could use one of the Asrock Rack workstation boards like the C236 WSI or C246 WSI with 8 SATA ports built in so you could use the PCIe for extra network or Wifi connectivity..
You would have to double check motherboard and case compatibility (expansion slots, cpu cooler clearance etc) but you should be able to build a small powerful unit depending on your needs.
If you want to build something yourself then you can go down theabove route and then install freenas or xpenology.
xpenology is ported synology software.
I have a Qnap 871 (8 bay) i7 16gb ram so I can run plex server etc..this is populated now with 8x10TB Hitachi drives and the internal fans can be swapped out as its standard connection, I have swapped mine with Noctua fans so nice and quite and is always on.i have also installed a 10gbe network card for fast transfers of my 4K stuff.
@Smurfin you made any choices?I am wondering what to do myself as thinking of reducing some power consumption etc.