Hopefully this isnt too long, easy to follow and not all over the place.
A few years ago, I help friends and family replace hard drives for their kids as their drives got too small. School, college, etc. Well they didnt want the old drives so I had a pile of them.
I had a plex server and decided an external source for storage.
I decided to buy a case: Corsair Obsidian Series 750D Full Tower ATX Case - Obsidian Series™ 750D Full Tower ATX Case
I bought the extra 3x 3.5" cages for a total of 6 and also bought 3x icy dock 6x 2.5" hot swap bays.
Case has 4 internal 2.5, thus I Had 18 spinning drives + 22 ssd drives. Motherboard had an m.2 slot so I ran a 256gb for sata cache.
Ran Windows Server 2016 and Stablebit Drive Pool. Really like it!
I connected all the drives via an 8i hba and 36port expander and things worked great for many years. I would swap drives out if i got bigger ones.
Well now I have been having issues with the system losing a drive here and there, reboot and the drive is back. Weird... so I havent messed with the box in a while.
Decided time to get upgraded from an i5-6600k. I had a spare msi motherboard, 64gb ram so why not, especially since I am now 10gb network and the sata are my bottleneck, even with the cache because great for writing but not cache for reading.
Pulled motherboard and put in:
msi z690a ddr4 motherboard
64 gb ddr4 memory
hba/expander and had issues with the system recognizing the hba and expander. Fought with it for a while and said screw it.. pulled them.
I found a neat adapter and bought one:
https://www.amazon.com/SATA3-0-Adapter-Expansion-Interface-Indicator/dp/B0B75JWXXS
View attachment 745170
I put it in and it worked!!!!!
I put Windows 11 on a 500gb SSD, connected to motherboard sata 1, connected 2x 10tb spinning drives to sata 2 and 3, connected sata 4 and 5 plus the 6x m.2 sata to my icy docks and all was working!!!!! decided to push my luck as my motherboard has 4 total M.2 slots and bought 3 more adapters.
They just came in plus Beaflag VonRathburg sold me long sata cables that just came in. Thanks for the hookup!!!!
I still have one M.2 adapter to put in and connect drives, but I am stoked right now!
Number 24 is the Stablebit pool drive, so not a real drive but here is where I am at now...
View attachment 745171
here is what I love about stablebit drive pool... you can miss match drive sizes and do duplication (more of a file replication versus striping files) .
I need to activate stablebit but you can see all is nice and healthy right now. need to get the files balanced though...
View attachment 745172
this is now my plex server and storage server versus separate and the SSD's are nice, especially when you launch live tv as it caches locally.
I will get the 4th M.2 in, give time and report back. I still have room to add an hba if I feel the need for more drives but I have 24, room for 6 more via ports... so I think 30 drives are good enough and I will eventually start replacing my 500gb with 2tb.
A few years ago, I help friends and family replace hard drives for their kids as their drives got too small. School, college, etc. Well they didnt want the old drives so I had a pile of them.
I had a plex server and decided an external source for storage.
I decided to buy a case: Corsair Obsidian Series 750D Full Tower ATX Case - Obsidian Series™ 750D Full Tower ATX Case
I bought the extra 3x 3.5" cages for a total of 6 and also bought 3x icy dock 6x 2.5" hot swap bays.
Case has 4 internal 2.5, thus I Had 18 spinning drives + 22 ssd drives. Motherboard had an m.2 slot so I ran a 256gb for sata cache.
Ran Windows Server 2016 and Stablebit Drive Pool. Really like it!
I connected all the drives via an 8i hba and 36port expander and things worked great for many years. I would swap drives out if i got bigger ones.
Well now I have been having issues with the system losing a drive here and there, reboot and the drive is back. Weird... so I havent messed with the box in a while.
Decided time to get upgraded from an i5-6600k. I had a spare msi motherboard, 64gb ram so why not, especially since I am now 10gb network and the sata are my bottleneck, even with the cache because great for writing but not cache for reading.
Pulled motherboard and put in:
msi z690a ddr4 motherboard
64 gb ddr4 memory
hba/expander and had issues with the system recognizing the hba and expander. Fought with it for a while and said screw it.. pulled them.
I found a neat adapter and bought one:
https://www.amazon.com/SATA3-0-Adapter-Expansion-Interface-Indicator/dp/B0B75JWXXS
View attachment 745170
I put it in and it worked!!!!!
I put Windows 11 on a 500gb SSD, connected to motherboard sata 1, connected 2x 10tb spinning drives to sata 2 and 3, connected sata 4 and 5 plus the 6x m.2 sata to my icy docks and all was working!!!!! decided to push my luck as my motherboard has 4 total M.2 slots and bought 3 more adapters.
They just came in plus Beaflag VonRathburg sold me long sata cables that just came in. Thanks for the hookup!!!!
I still have one M.2 adapter to put in and connect drives, but I am stoked right now!
Number 24 is the Stablebit pool drive, so not a real drive but here is where I am at now...
View attachment 745171
here is what I love about stablebit drive pool... you can miss match drive sizes and do duplication (more of a file replication versus striping files) .
I need to activate stablebit but you can see all is nice and healthy right now. need to get the files balanced though...
View attachment 745172
this is now my plex server and storage server versus separate and the SSD's are nice, especially when you launch live tv as it caches locally.
I will get the 4th M.2 in, give time and report back. I still have room to add an hba if I feel the need for more drives but I have 24, room for 6 more via ports... so I think 30 drives are good enough and I will eventually start replacing my 500gb with 2tb.
