It’s time to get some storage for the homelab. I could get a Synology, but I’d quite like to build my own using ZFS.
However it seems hard (or my Google-fu sucks) to find good, reasonably priced 4 bay JBODs. Most of what I can find either looks very cheap or is almost as expensive as a Synology.
Any suggestions?
Cheap, used, yours or a friend’s old computer case stuffed with some cheap Amazon or EBay hdd drive cage (~$40-90). I’ve had a 15y/o case a coworker gave me with a cheap 5 slot cage placed where the 5.25 bays used to be for at least 5 years now. The real place to spend money is on a quality psu to run the thing.
I would second this. A normal tower with a high quality psu and 5 drives is what I use for cheap storage. Obviously more failure prone than true enterprise hardware but a hell of a lot cheaper.
That’s a great idea, thanks!
For that number of disks, I would just buy a case that holds the number of disks you want and build a computer in that case; either move your existing home lab into that case or setup a new one and export the storage over the network.
Buy a used computer and put 4 drives in it?
I haven’t had a desktop pc in decades and I always forget this is an option. Doh!
If you’re not going server grade I’d just throw up a 4-bay docking station like this and do ZFS or LVM. Perfectly fine for single-user or family type stuff.
That’s a good call, thanks!!
Most towers will fit 4 drives.
If you’re out of SATA ports or M2s you can buy PCI adapters.
If you’re buying SSDs they’re small and don’t care about orientation, can but plugged into the cables and stuffed anywhere in the case that doesn’t impede airflow.
Where do you want your drives? What sort of drives? I’ve also found it more performant to stuff them in the case and 4 drives isn’t a stretch unless you’re also running a ton in the target server.
I don’t know what your budget is, but I recently bought a Sabrent 4-bay housing for ~$230:
It’s got USB-C 3.2, so transfer speeds are plenty quick, and each bay has it’s own locking door and dedicated power button for easy hot swapping. The only downside is that if there’s an unexpected sudden power loss, you have to manually turn each drive bay back on, and there’s no way to do it remotely.
Interesting design. I’ve never seen a device that has power buttons on each drive bay.
That’s a great price, weird that you turn each drive on individually! Thanks. :-)
It’s meant for hot swapping, so you don’t have to shut off the whole housing. But yeah, the fact that it doesn’t turn back on after a sudden power loss is… inconvenient. Mine is stationed at my parents’ place (they have gigabit fiber).
You could buy an old 1u server on eBay
It’ll have to live in my office, and my experience with most rack mount servers is that they are pretty noisy?
They can be. I have a supermicro 2u server that has a 12 disk backplane that I stripped of its original mobo and fans and put in my own gear. Its pretty quiet once you replace all of the stock fans with noctua.
They aren’t usually terribly noisy and you can control the fans through the emc/idrac/etc. I used to keep mine on my desk or entertainment stand and put a TV on it lol
I’ve been using this one for a few years now, it’s got 1 extra drive slot for a total of 5. It supports USB 3.2 so I get pretty good speeds on it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ND3JNZ6
Awesome, thanks!
