Future Expansion

[Loren Lang]

I had been wanting to deploy a NAS in my house to centralize my media - I took a workstation tower and built a simple deployment: 1TB NVME SSD for OS, (2) 4TB SATA SSDs for fast media & (2) 8TB HDDs for slow media. It's running without issue but I think I want to go further. I am out of SATA ports on the motherboard so I was considering adding an HBA but other than being able go add another NVME (one of the SATA ports on the motherboard is linked with that slot making it to where I can only use one or the other) and another couple hard drives I think my case is going to limit how much expansion I can do without needing to build or buy an external hard drive chassis and pass thru the cables. I currently run Plex on a separate box with a similar footprint but I didn't do Plex on my HexOS instance initially because I don't relish going thru the initial config again (issues with media getting incorrectly associated). If I am going to go thru the effort, I need to get creative. Are there any users out there that used a standard PC tower - how many drives did you use in your setup? I think I want to add 2 more SATA SSDs and 4 more HDDs - I will migrate the 2060 from the tower hosting Plex to speed trancoding and add another NVME (probably caching). Just curious if anyone else has used a host bus adapter in their setup and how it went

Edited February 15 by Loren Lang

[Mobius]

I have a pc case (phanteks P500) that supported 5+ drives and its the temp home of my HexOS server. I don't think it was a smart purchase lol. I probably would have been a lot happier with a dedicated NAS case and in fact i do plan to eventually purchase a Jonsbo N5 to replace the P500.

I have 5 hdd and 2 ssd in my setup
128gb nvme for boot ssd (anything more is just a waste of storage)
2tb nvme waiting for single drive pool support (will be used to install apps)

I have not needed a HBA card yet but i plan to get a LSI card when i get the jonsbo n5 and jump straight to 12 drives.

[Mawson]

One of my servers is in a Nanoxia Deep Silence case that supports 12 drives and 3 front panel bays. There are definitely cases that can house a lot of drives.

If you're looking to add drives to your current case there are options too, especially if you have 5.25" front drive bays you can use. If you have 2 you can fit 3 more HDDS, and if you have 3 open you can get adapters that will let you put 5x 3.5" hdds!

Beyond that I would start looking into net cases with lots of drive bays. They can be tower style like the Nanoxia I have, or more desktop/cube-ish like a Jonsbo NAS case