Took A Bit Of Time But Found Deals On eBay (Yes, It Was Worth The Wait)

[Iliyria]

The motherboard on my prior NAS decided to take a take a dirt nap a few weeks ago. I have been thinking about replacing it before hand but this made my decision easier. I wasn't in too much of a hurry and searched eBay for about 2 weeks looking for parts and sending lower offers to sellers for parts to build my new NAS. Finally, after 2-3 weeks its now in my production homelab. I think I got the recertified drives for around 20 bucks or less each. If you are not in a rush and you take your time, you can definitely find deals and build a pretty nice NAS on the cheap cheap... don't forget to haggle with offers! Its very quiet but, it weighs about 80 pounds.

 

Specs:
Core chassis: Dell T430
CPU: Dual Xeon E5-2667v4
RAM:   384GB ECC DDR4 (2400)
PSUs: Redundant 1100W Platinum  
HBA: LSI 9300-16i
Storage Pool: 13x 4TB SAS 12GBp/s 7.2K drives (in ZFS Z2)
Boot Drive: NVMe (Connected to internal USB 3.0)
SLOG: 256GB SDD
L2ARC: 1TB SSD
Transcoding: ARC310
NIC: x710-DA2 SFP+
Fans: All replaced with silent Noctua
Extra 5 port drive bay: SilverStone FS305-12G drive cage

 

Edited yesterday at 05:56 AM by Iliyria

[Sonic]

Looks nice! A real homelab monster. Only the amount of memory is a little bit low 😀. Just joking

What do you want to do with so much capacity? I am really curious. I don't think you only want to use this machine for storage.

[Iliyria]

3 hours ago, Sonic said:

Looks nice! A real homelab monster. Only the amount of memory is a little bit low 😀. Just joking

What do you want to do with so much capacity? I am really curious. I don't think you only want to use this machine for storage.

IIll admit it, its partially because I can/could but, Veeam use to beat the crap out of my NAS doing network backups. I like to tinker and all my job VM experience is with Hyper-V, now I can check out other hosts and learn more for the future and be more marketable. 

[Sonic]

Please share your experiences. I am looking forward to it. Which VM hosts do you have in mind to start with?

[Iliyria]

1 hour ago, Sonic said:

Please share your experiences. I am looking forward to it. Which VM hosts do you have in mind to start with?

To be honest, I haven't even given it a thought of yet

[Mobius]

One thing i was considering going forward was getting amazon refurb drives and getting the ~$200/year asurion insurance for all amazon purchases.
It might not be worth it if you don't spend much on amazon but if you do, it looks like a great value.

A friend of mine has a toddler who's only hobby is breaking expensive things and he has saved a lot of money with the insurance.

[Sonic]

@Iliyria, Is there a specific reason you created one big RaidZ2 pool with 13 HDDs? Why not e.g. a pool with 7 HDDs and one with 6 HDDs?  From what I have read online people recommend raidz2 if the number of disks are between 8 - 12 because the resilver time is too long and there's a high chance of another disk failing during the process. But say that it's better to use less disks in a pool. I try to learn a lot about ZFS.

[Sonic]

2 hours ago, Iliyria said:

To be honest, I haven't even given it a thought of yet

I use Proxmox and I installed HexOs in a VM with SATA and NVME passtrough. I am not the only one in this forum with such a setup. In the past I used VMWare ESXi, but since the Broadcom takeover it is not suitable for a homelab anymore.

[Iliyria]

41 minutes ago, Mobius said:

One thing i was considering going forward was getting amazon refurb drives and getting the ~$200/year asurion insurance for all amazon purchases.
It might not be worth it if you don't spend much on amazon but if you do, it looks like a great value.

A friend of mine has a toddler who's only hobby is breaking expensive things and he has saved a lot of money with the insurance.

Im not going to lie, I knew I was buying used drives so I bought the eBay insurance from Allstate Protection for $9.98 for 2 years

[Iliyria]

35 minutes ago, Sonic said:

@Iliyria, Is there a specific reason you created one big RaidZ2 pool with 13 HDDs? Why not e.g. a pool with 7 HDDs and one with 6 HDDs?  From what I have read online people recommend raidz2 if the number of disks are between 8 - 12 because the resilver time is too long and there's a high chance of another disk failing during the process. But say that it's better to use less disks in a pool. I try to learn a lot about ZFS.

I was originally going to go with 10 drives plus 1 spare and no SLOG drive. Then I remembered I had new SSDs laying around for a couple years and my OCD would go nuts knowing I had unfilled bays... so I put HDs in them since I bought a couple extras as emergency spares in case of failure   

[Mobius]

5 hours ago, Iliyria said:

Im not going to lie, I knew I was buying used drives so I bought the eBay insurance from Allstate Protection for $9.98 for 2 years

Now thats a wicked deal