Oddly, I recently went the other direction. In the past I've built some storage servers similar to this, and 6 months ago I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB).
Loving it!
Now, my storage needs are fairly modest in comparison to the author. I'm running with RAID-Z2 and at 44% capacity. I have this unit in my work workstation, at an external office. It is quiet and cool.
I used to have a big house with a room I could put a bunch of computers in. I moved to a smaller house, but more importantly I was just tired of managing a business-class infrastructure at home (VLANs, multiple APs, UPSs, batteries, patch panel, servers, etc).
So I copied a backup of my storage server from an off-site box, to S3 with Glacier, copied the primary to this ZFS array on my workstation, removed junk I was just holding on to, and now my home infrastructure consists of a Cable Modem and Google WiFi mesh. Huge improvement in maintenance!
> I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB)
Thanks, I didn't realise these exist.
I've been wanting to create a DIY version of Synology's "slim" model line [1] for a while, but haven't been able to find an off-the-shelf enclosure that would fit my needs. Putting six drives in a 5.25" bay is a fantastic idea.
I came across this product recently: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1 which is seeking crowd funding at the moment. Personally I think they've made a mistake by going for 2.5" storage first with 3.5" coming later. Anyway, it sounds like it might be of interest to you?
That looks really great if one's concerned about the FOSS nature of their storage. Thanks for the recommendation!
I'm not sure if an ARM chipset would do justice for a multi-disk NAS setup though (or if the GnuBee would support RAID5/6 — it does seem to, with LVM/mdadm). My experience with consumer ARM-based NASes was that they suffered on transfer speed. I ended up going with a 4th generation Intel Pentium chip on a mini-ITX board, which offered the best compromise between price, performance, and power consumption for my use case.
I like the design and 2.5" choice. But if it doesn't support zfs it's no go for me. If you (abstract) are not concerned with bit rot you doing NAS wrong. Something like that running FreeNAS (w/o dedup) would be ideal for me.
I've used the Supermicro enclosures that turn 3x 5.25 bays into 5 3.5" bays and been pretty happy with them. Something similar to the CSE-M35S. More recently (5 years ago now :-) I tried some 5 bay E-SATA enclosures so I wouldn't have to pack these Supermicro into the chassis, and the eSATA were nothing but trouble. Hopefully better these days.
Not quite as slim, but I recently put a super micro d-1520 motherboard in an old intel ss4200 case that's relatively compact (could theoretically put it in a 30l backpack) and it holds 4 desktop hard drives: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/another-x10sdv-...
Oddly enough, I had gotten these drives originally a couple years ago to go in a 1U Supermicro "twin" machine, with 8 drive bays split across two physical machines in a 1U chassis. Then the cheap hosting for that fell through and they just sat in a box. Came across them while cleaning the garage and put them into service.
I think these are the Toshiba drives. Seems like 2TB is still as big as you can go on laptop form factor spinning drives.
Loving it!
Now, my storage needs are fairly modest in comparison to the author. I'm running with RAID-Z2 and at 44% capacity. I have this unit in my work workstation, at an external office. It is quiet and cool.
I used to have a big house with a room I could put a bunch of computers in. I moved to a smaller house, but more importantly I was just tired of managing a business-class infrastructure at home (VLANs, multiple APs, UPSs, batteries, patch panel, servers, etc).
So I copied a backup of my storage server from an off-site box, to S3 with Glacier, copied the primary to this ZFS array on my workstation, removed junk I was just holding on to, and now my home infrastructure consists of a Cable Modem and Google WiFi mesh. Huge improvement in maintenance!
Here's a blog post I wrote about one of the previous incarnations: https://www.tummy.com/articles/ultimatestorage2008/