Home Raid
Over the years I have become somewhat of a digital pack rat. I started with a simple setup consisting of 4 300GB drives attached to an adaptec raid card running raid 5. When that ran out of space I added an additional 5 500GB hard drives and proceeded to fill those. But a lack of raid resulted in a large loss of data one day.
It became clear to me that I need a lot more storage, more redundancy from drive failure, better throughput and something that could give me some bragging rights.
The solution was to build a large raid box with TONS of storage using multiple mirrored raid 5 arrays. To do this I purchaced a Norco 4224 case and equiped it with the following:
- 1000 Watt power supply
- Dual CPU Xenon Processor motherboard w/procs
- 16GB of Ram
- 2 3ware 9500S raid cards (12 Sata channels each)
- All required 8087 -> Sata cables
- Replacement (Silent) fans
- 12 1.5TB hard drives
- 12 2TB hard drives
- Server 2008 R2
Once completed this setup ran for a few years before i managed to fill it up and then require more space. The solution I came up with was to add another Norco 4224 with an additional 24 3TB drives running off a new raid controller located in the previously configured server.
This expansion consisted of the following:
- A new Norco 4224 case to hold 24 more HDD's
- 800 Watt power supply (dont have to run a motherboard)
- A small PCI-E board to run the SAS expander
- HP SAS expander (2 16GB channels in 6 out)
- 2x External to internal 8087 plates
- 8x 8087 cables
- 3x new 120mm fans and new 120mm fan plate
- 24 3TB HDD's
- 2x External 8087 cable to connect up to the other 4224
- IBM Raid card that supports multipath and SAS expanders (to go into other 4224)
Both of these cases are rack mounted in my basement and a run 24x7.
**2024 update, things may have gotten a little out of hand.... This is only one of the 2 racks 🙂 each of the 24 drive chassis is setup differently. One is using TrueNas, One is using Unraid, One is Raid 6 using LSI cards, the last one is using Drive Bender on server 2018. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
