That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting silly.
What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of disks?
It was cheap and easy, (the chassis much more expensive than the shelving/rack - but the value's in the hot swappable bays) think I'd recommend it.
> As a person interested using Xpenology you should keep in mind, that this is not an official Synology release. Although it’s based on the official Synology DSM which is the same as whats found on the actual Synology devices, it’s not officially supported by Synology. You could get support from the community for this software, but not from the company itself. Typically once you’re up and running things are very stable without any issues but just know that calling support is not an option when you’re not running on an official Synology device.
I say get a beefy Synology, maybe a tape drive, and rent whatever else you need in the cloud. Plus a desktop/laptop as you prefer.
I've never been unhappy with anything I've bought from them.
If you want a lot of 3.5" internal hot-swap drives, you may need to find a case with 5.25" bays, which is getting harder to find.
I wish I could find an alternative that is as affordable.
I personally prefer the QNAP options as those either re-branded or integrated from chipsets that are widely supported in Linux and BSD.
There are rackable ATX cases like the Rosewill RSV-L4500 which don't have the enterprise-y niceties but are perfectly service-able and fairly quiet for a dozen disks.
You can probably do a lot better by building a custom one, but that is going to be a lot more expensive. I would love to hear from anyone with experience in this actually, as I'm kind of starting to get fed up with it.
Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago.
Another annoyance is that they will mostly come with some kind of hardware RAID card that doesn't passthrough raw disks. Often, a completely worthless one that must be replaced. Even if it's a less terrible one, it will require reflashing if you want to use it in JBOD mode (for ZFS or software RAID).
All that being said, considering that I paid $140 shipped for this HP server 3 years ago, I'm not sure how much I can complain. Setup was a pain in the ass, but once I got it done, it's been working mostly flawlessly since. The only ongoing pain points for me are the lack of USB3, and the fan noise. (I could add a USB3 PCI card, perhaps, but I'm sure that would increase the fan noise even more!)
Newer HPE servers with iLO 5 need any plain browser to access iLO, and for the remote console, give you the choice of HTML5, .Net, or Java. I have a Gen10 Microserver and the HTML5 console works flawlessly in Chrome.
If you need just about 8 or fewer HDDs and don't need hotswap, there's many options like just normal ATX case.
If you need silence, Don't get a server case that supports 8cm fan only!
The needs of each homelab can be different though. Some homelabs don't need to be that serious from a power/noise/energy cost perspective just to get ECC, unless there is an explicit benefit from it.
Making do without ECC can be perfectly possible for some or most portions of a homelab.
Separating your storage as an appliance/service (dedicated NAS with low power usage) is worth running a comparison on.
When I had the full whack server rack it was pulling that a month and 99% of the time it was idle.
The price/watt ratio is helpful to have something you set, forget and don't notice running in the background.