Hello Friendos
I’m a security / cloud engineer and I’ve had this lab for about 6 months now. In the last few weeks I’ve decided to start using it to self host some “production” services for me and my loved ones (extended family of 15) Mainly a next cloud instance that serves as our “picture vault”
The hardware is a poweredge R430 with twin ES-2620’s and 128 GBs. It has 8x1TB 2.5
HDDs
This thing ended up being really overpowered for what I use it and I feel like by now I have explored everything I wanted to in this hardware. I was thinking about laterally scaling to R230s so I could play with load balancing and HA.
However these servers only have 2-4 drive bays, and I have no experience with DAS.
Can you guys help with some links? I’m researching DAS enclosures. I understand that any server with a PCI slot can take a SAS card, and any SAS enclosure is compatible.
Can you guys foresee any issue with a server as small as an R230 connecting to a SAS DAS?
I see that DAS enclosures have multiple connections per module, would I be able to connect multiple servers to the same module? or is it one server per connection and it can’t be shared?
If I have to share the connection, I would have to host a NAS (I probably should anyways) and will have to upgrade my switch from gigabit to 10G
Would also appreciate some other recommendations for small form factor servers that can be bought for cheap. (18 inches or shorter)
Pic of current setup for attention … don’t judge my PC case :) 3U chassis for it is on the mail.
DAS is 1:1, It’s more or less like just connecting en external hard drive to your computer.
SAN can do some crazier stuff. You can take arrays and attach them to LUN’s and to sign luns to separate computers. You have fiber optic routing and virtual networks, sometimes iSCSI. But that stuff is extremely expensive and power hungry and did I mention extremely expensive
NAS is basically just a computer with disks attached to it sharing the data through one of her protocols you need.
For home gaming, even sharing with a extended family, truenas, unraid, or just a computer with ZFS is ideal.
ZFS is the elite but slightly harder way to do it. Your volumes all need to be the same size even if your disks are different sizes. There’s regular maintenance that needs to be applied, But it’s very fast and very flexible and very easy to expand.
Unraid is very slow but very flexible, the discs aren’t in a raid they’re in a JBOD, so really really slow, But if you lose one disc all you’ve lost is the data on that disk, and you can run up to two parity discs. As long as your parity drives are larger than your largest data drive.
Truenas is more of an unraid type situation but with a ZFS. Both unraid and truenas support virtualization and/or containers for running applications and give you nice metrics and meters and stuff.
You can hand roll with Debian, ZFS, docker and proxmox.
I think DAS is pretty much dead. If you have a ton of ephemeral data, and you need to do high speed work on it It’s a reasonable solution. But I think for the most part eight terabyte nvme has made it pretty niche.