The racks came with air blower fan modules, and master power cutoff modules, along with some absurdly long power strips.

The fan blowers are fully contaminated with some very nasty, gritty feeling dust, so getting those cleaned, or better, refurbished with Noctua fans, is gonna be another, different subproject. On the plus side, they appear to be standard sized fans, and I strongly suspect I could bolt liquid cooling radiators onto them for use in the second rack...

Which will become home to some virtual server heads... 😁

I am able to get domestic fiber here, so this should be a fun little project, once I have it all assembled.

My big concern would be noise and power which translate into both heat and hit to your wallet. 48 <1TB drives is still under 43TB of usable storage. It's across a lot of drives so you'll have great throughput, but three 14TB drives will give you the same amount of space. Throw in a fourth and you can have a parity drive.

Enterprise servers are another issue. They are designed for blow through cooling with no concern for noise. Prepare for the sound of a jet engine readying for takeoff.

If you want to tinker and explore, go for it. But I would advice against a 24/7 setup unless it's in the winter when you need heating.

I'm not sure what type of fiber you can get. But Pentium Gold 8505 mini PCs with two SPF+ that can handle up to 10Gb networking are ~$300 and the SOC only uses 15W. Total draw can will very greatly due to whatever SPF devices you end up with. But that's enough power to route, run a media stack, and host normal services.

I'm a trained SAN guy, I know the sound.

I *also* know that I can slowly transition this shelf from spinny disk to commodity m.2 flash modules, which use a fraction of the power, and produce much less heat.

The caddies and shelf are agnostic to what disk type is in there, as long as it is sff sas.

So, things like this can go in the caddies.

https://www.amazon.se/-/en/BeMatik-NVMe-SFF-8 … r/dp/B07RMHH4GW

The project room is permitted to be noisy. The tomatoes wont care.

Mostly, I couldnt beat the price for second hand shelves with storage. Many sales wanted vastly more for empty shelves, without disk caddies, and with obscene shipping.

I got 2 shelves FULL OF DISKS, and very well packaged, for 600$ WITH shipping.

Again, I am aware that I dont *need* to fill these with spinny disks. There *are* options to go full flash. I can just hit the ground running cheaply this way, and hold on to the spinny disks for 'thrashy' applications and spares for same, later.

If I go full flash later, i'd bulk buy the adapters from aliexpress.

Sounds like you know what you're getting into. Some people would see all the empty space on the racks and get a bunch of "cheap" servers. Then get shocked when their monthly power bill is more than they spent on the hardware.

No. I intend to put a home made linux head in an aftermarket 4U rackmount chasis, that's designed for liquid cooling.

Perhaps not this one, but similar.

https://www.amazon.com/RackChoice-rackmount-C … /dp/B0BXJ5HF2W/

While I do in fact know how to administer a old FAS series netapp filer head, there is ZERO compelling reason for me to do so.

That case supports a front facing liquid cooling radiator, and can accept server boards, and commodity psu's. It shouldnt break the bank to run.

The disk shelves are where the hunger will be, and again, a road to all flash exists.

Wow, that is some space to play with

Indeed. When the prospect of saving them frim the dump came up, I jumped on it.

While hardly fasionable home decor, there's a lot of fun you can put in a rack.

Re: Flash Later, agnostic shelf

The thing that's hard to get without getting scalped are the caddies.

(Seriously. Look at this awful price. I got a FULL SHELF FULL OF DISKS, for 300, with shipping! This is JUST the caddies!)

OUCHIE! My wallet!

This is why I bought 'with disks' and did not care about their capacity.

Aa for the caddies themselves...

I pulled a caddie and took it outside for better photography.

These are nice HGST brand drives, and not shitty seagate garbage, so I got a steal in terms of spinny disk, imo.

However, you can see that these are just normal SFF SAS, in every way.

The shelf does not care.

This is why the SFF flash adapters can just go right in.

(Insider info: I used to be a Netapp support rep for FAS series filers. While the drive pictured is netapp branded, due to it's model number nomenclature, it's actually a bog standard HGST drive in every physical way, with a blessed netapp firmware. This firmware is enforced by Netapp filer heads, not the disk shelves. A dirty secret is that the R&D people buy the correct model generic disk, and just write their blessed firmware on it with hgst's firmware updater. Another dirty secret is that you can turn off enforcement of blessed firmware in those filers. I dont care, since I wont be using a netapp filer. The shelf just talks ordinary SAS, and just reports drive identity info as it gets it. No policing. You can put any old SFF SAS disk in there. The only caveat, and a pretty big one, is that the adapter you drop in must not be SFF-8639 direct NVME passthrough. You need one that can supply the correct signalling. These DO exist. The connector design for SAS disks is meant to be back compatible, in that older drives should be connectable to the newer port. So, to have the correct signalling for this shelf, you need an M.2 adapter that has "B-Key" msata support. (Like this ugly thing). msata B key is slower, but also cheaper, so meh. )

Nice Rack, great looking pair

...I'll stop now.

Seriously though, still dream of getting a full sized rack for the garage to set up my servers and Comm's gear properly.
And free/cheap second hand units are becoming rare with companies downsizing physical hardware for quite a while now.

I was also going to say $600 for the lot is good price as caddies by themself are never cheap, but you already covered that!

Will this be data storage for the whole house or just for you projects? If it's the latter then no need to run 24/7 anyway

Yup.

I too held off on this kind of thing, because shipping big racks like that would be prohibitively expensive. Fate just dealt me a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I scarfed it down.

Ultimately, I want to use this as a storage appliance to host some virtual game servers for some side channel income. (Thus, the research into using commodity flash devices instead of using power hungry spinny disks).

I will probably leave a few of them in the shelf for use as swap space LUNs for said virtual servers (Swap on flash is not wise, and I want to avoid having compressed swap in ram), since some of the stand alone server daemons out there ONLY run on windows (and windows gets BigMad if it does not have swap)

I want to plan ahead for reducing the utility bill in advance. Thus, all the research into inexpensive flash in the shelf.

These shelves have IOM6 controllers in them, and those support SATA transport over SAS, so the MSATA M.2 adapters to SFF SAS should work without quibble.

(The much faster NVME to SAS adapters use a much newer transport that my shelves dont speak. I'd need newer shelves. These shelves were second hand for a reason, and I'm not gonna cry in my beer over that. MSATA adapters are fine.)

I get paid again next Wednesday. I'll go shopping for a 10gbit switch that does LAPC then.