But you need a newish PCIe connection to get decent speeds from the drives no?
Comment on How bad of an idea is it to use computing HDDs in a DIY NAS?
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
If you can use SAS (you’ll need a SAS PCIe card, roughly $50 used), get SAS drives. They are enterprise-grade exclusively, there is a massive supply of used drives as servers get refreshed, and a very limited secondhand market because most people can’t use SAS drives.
You won’t get the latest or largest drives, but you’ll get something that works perfectly fine for home use.
theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
This is highly dependent on what your needs are and how you plan to solve it. SATA-3 maxes at 6gbit, which SAS-2 had in 2009. Most cards are x8, and have at least 4 full speed SAS lanes (of whatever generation). That means 24 Gbit. PCIe x8 2.0 (from 2007) had 4 GB (32 Gbit). So if that meets your needs, you can run it on an ancient board.
However, if you need something more advanced, such as SAS-3, a SAS expander, or a card with more native lanes, then you would need to plan accordingly.
I’ve been running on an LSI 9211-4i4e, which is only a PCIe 2.0 card, for many years. I did notice my speeds dropped when I expanded the 4e to a 15-bay DAS (plus the 4 internal SATA drives), but it’s still enough to meet my needs.
theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I will definitely have to do my homework on all of these transfer rates lol
SAS drives are way cheaper on eBay and such but I don’t know if I feel confident enough to move from SATA to SAS for my first DIY NAS already. It sounds very easy with the PCIe SAS adapter but still daunting at the same time.
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org 3 days ago
Pcie is ridiculously fast. I think you will have a hard time making out even a 1x pcie 4.0 slot with hdds. It can do 1.9 gbytes per second.
theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
idk which naming scheme is worse: PCIe or USB. Not that I would know too much about transfer speeds but the plethora of different version surely doesn’t help.
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 4 days ago
Yes, but enterprise grade stuff on second hand market is basically always fairly priced (you don’t get a “good deal”, just a normal one).
That said, I would still rather go refurnished server disks than desktop, especially lower capacities.
theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
Refurbishes server disks you mean exclusively SAS drives or also SATA?
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 4 days ago
Also SATA. There’s basically no difference.
(We don’t have all the same needs, so no right or wrong answers. All my current HDDs are SATA, which saves me one smol hassle in potential migrations/changes/salvages/troubleshooting, but nothing major. Perhaps they were even a little tiny bit cheaper new than the same with SAS, but that’s not a rule. I do have two SAS SSDs bcs they looked cool & I wanted to have them even after they become obsolete.)
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
It’s not really about 24/7, but it is about quality of components. Enterprise gear is made using slightly better parts and tighter tolerances. Things like more expensive capacitors rated for more hours/cycles, better power filters, things like that.
The end result (and this is easily verified) is the failure rate is much, much lower than comparable consumer-grade equipment.
There is sometimes a blurry line between what counts as enterprise vs pro-sumer vs consumer gear, though.