Does HDD placement within a 10-bay setup matter?

[Cyphastrea]

Building my first NAS inside a Sliger 3u NAS case. Still in the hardware assembly phase (have not installed the HexOS yet). 10-Slot HDD bay in front. Does placement within those 10 bays matter for HDDs?

Could I place my starting 4 drives next to one another? Like in a cluster?

Should I space them every other, for heat dissipation?

Does placement affect pool creation whatsoever?

Edited January 12 by Cyphastrea

[ubergeek]

For ease of replacing dead drives I typically start with sda0 and make sure they are in order . They should have proper spacing for airflow because spinning disks will create heat.

A pic of my nas for reference 

Temps stay 28-40c 

Edited January 12 by ubergeek

[Mawson]

As far as physical placement, I don't see any reason that you would need to separate the drives... better to keep them congregated so that if/when you add more drives you don't have to move the existing ones. (though even if you needed to it should be fine since the drives are id'd by their unique id's, which means it shouldn't matter if they change which port they are on).

Separating the drives would likely have some impact on performance and longevity, but not enough to worry about in my opinion. Hard drives are pretty much a solved science at this point, and they are designed to operate in proximity with each other. Enterprise drives may be built to handle this better than consumer units, but in a small chassis use case like this even that probably won't make a significant difference.

Physical placement won't affect the pool creation directly, that would be more related to which order you plug your SATA cables into the back plane. Even then, it doesn't really matter, it just may change which drive exactly is 'sda', 'sdb', etc.

Are you planning to use a HBA card. or native SATA ports off of your motherboard? For 10+ drives I imagine you would need an HBA eventually, but if you are starting with only 4 plus a boot device you could probably do that on most motherboards.

If you are using an HBA you may be more easily able to plug the cables into the backplane in numerical order, which in theory would set things up so that your left most drive would start as 'sda', and then proceed through the alphabet, with drive no. 10 being 'sdj', and the boot device potentially being 'sdk'.

(And no, I totally didn't have to count out the letters of the alphabet to get that answer... why would you ask such a silly question?? 🤣)

[WilliamsKnights]

As long as you check on the heat and airflow thee  location of drives and order you populate should be unimportant.   Obviously if you put all the drives together you will create a hotspot. but as long as you have sufficient airflow over that area it should not matter.

I agree with @mawson  Better to keep them together as you populate so as to avoid interfering with them when you add more drives.  SATA/SAS connectors are not the strongest. so the less movement they have the better.

 

[bashbash]

Might be too late for this, and not necessarily what you asked, but Id recommend also having a way to label them. Either on your phones notes app or a piece of paper (maybe in the case so you know where to find it?).

When I first set up my server I got an error message overnight saying one of the drives were messed up and it said "drive ID XXXXXXXX" , luckily I only had 3 drives so it was easy to know what is what, but I stole my sisters label maker and put their ID in a easier to read place on the drive cage.