I want to build a proper server with room for 40+ HDDs to move my media server to and have RAID 1. I know a lot about PCs and software, but when it comes to server hardware I have no clue what I'm doing. How would I go about building a server that has access to 40+ RAID 1'd HDDs?
Depends on your budget. Since you're asking here instead of talking to vendors, I guess you want used, so just browse ebay. You can get something used like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/404093943584
40+ disks ?? I crammed a mini server with 7 old HDD's totaling 2 tb and felt I was king of self-hosted! Now I feel small and peasant-like, damn you ;)
I am a bit curios what the average amount of disks/totalsize is for other data hoard.. self hosters in this sub ?
I only have 140TB atm, but I plan to expand. I want to backup all my Blu-rays, which will be at least 10 more HDDs. 2TBs used to be a lot. Lol
I have 300 blu-rays ripped full quality and that only takes 8.28TB. My entire media collection is just over 12TB. I have a friend who has a massively larger library and even he gets by with a NAS. My NAS only has ten disks and I have 84TB of storage. You're over-estimating your needs.
Ha, wild server :-) Yeah, I suddenly felt really old too ;-) Well I still have TWO whole free usb ports (2.0) on my tiny server, so I'm not upgrading yet !! 🙃
Check out labgopher.com. I think that link was first posted to r/homelab back in the day, but I've kept it in my bookmarks for exactly this.
My guesstimate is you have around 1,400 4K DVD rips. Do you need all of them?
You probably should look at RAID 6 with a cold spare (i.e. a drive sitting alongside the server.
ZFS allows you to create spare disks. ZFS spare disks are hot spares which are swapped in for faulty disks and swapped out when you replace the faulty disk.
I suggest that you calculate the cost to build this server, you should allow for NAS specific drives rather than the cheapest desktop drives.
You will need PCI to SATA cards to connect you drives.
I suggest that you look at the NAS builds on PC Part Picker.
Have a look at these pages
https://www.wundertech.net/diy-nas-build-guide/ https://nascompares.com/guide/build-your-own-nas-in-2024-should-you-bother/ https://www.storagereview.com/review/how-to-build-a-diy-nas-with-truenas-core
Finally check how much power and heat the server will produce. A server with that many drives will loud.
TrueNAS scale, LIS HBA cards, server motherboards with plenty of PCI Lanes ie AMD EPYC, large capacity HDD, just make sure they are CMR and not SMR drives. And Raidz2 is your friend. You will not need 40 drives, frankly you will fit 10,000 films, mostly 4K and 1000 complete TV series on a single 12 drive wide Raidz2 vDev using 20TB drives. That's enough to last 50 years in terms of viewing time.
If you really want a setup with that many disks, you might look into Ceph. It's intended for handling stupidly huge amounts of data spread across multiple servers with self-healing and other nice features. (As the name suggests it's a bit of a tentacle monster though.) One of my colleagues set up a deployment at work. It took a while for him to figure out how to get it running well but it's been pretty useful.
