Personally i ran JBODs for years, they often just works. I plan on using a TR-D800S at home for my MS-01, i just need storage with my system. I don't need gpu and if i do i can get a machine for that. So far JBOD from QNAP has done the job perfect for me as i don't hit the limite on speed with my home network right now plus my apple tv for my tv for watching movies is only 1GBE so yeah i will be fine for a good while
Please stop recommending minisofurm and similar to your large audience without pointing out they have a nearly non existent bios update track record and all their devices are basically vulnerable from the bios level since every few months there’s new cpu and bios vulnerabilities post specter
10:02 — "Make sure that you've got a Plan B." That's exactly my Golden Rule #1 for Hardware Architecture design and planning. For us puny peon non-hyperscalers, having double or triple sets of matched hardware and firmware at the ready seems essential. Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
11:30 — errors "as a result of cabling or signal issues." 3:33 — "SATA wasn't designed to push cables this long." Thank you 👍 Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
So, here is why I chose the 45HomeLab HL15. I could not find one of the mini machines that has ECC RAM. I run TrueNAS on mine and thus ZFS. I also didn't want the headaches that come with building all this stuff and finding all the roadblocks on my own.
6:20 – Why would you call it SAS6 if it's SAS2 6Gb/s, SAS3 is latest generation that supports 12Gb/s… I understand why it might be more convenient, but that's terrible to mix naming conventions like that
Please let mechanical drives die already. Let them go! Be free in the annals of history. Yes the cost is still much less, but so is the performance in speed, power, and data safety. If you have a real need for a large storage array, you can most probably justify the extra cost of SATA/SAS SSD or even NVMe. It has been years since I stopped using HDDs and SATA SSDs in favor of all NVMe for everything, both in a professional and personal contexts. The more we use NVMe the cheaper it gets. We now have 60TB single 2.5" NVMe drives with 128TB announced. Using monstrosities like that NetApp drive shelf is a disservice to the environment. the only place that belongs in is in a recycling stream, and maybe a museum soon.
WD just announced 32+64TB nvme ssds for Q3/24 and for next year 128TB and the year after 256TB capacities, we might get capacity vs price run up that could benefit the user, can not wait to consolidate all my archives dvds and external drives on a mini pc with two U.2/U.3
From a pure cost perspective, everyone interested in setups like these should take a mental step back and ask if more than 6 drives are really necessary. No, really. First impulse is "this looks nice, finally unlimited space for drives, hot-swapping and industry grade hardware!". And we all see the appeal. But for the money most of us are better off with a (potentially multiple) smaller machine(s). For my last NAS i went from 4x 3TB in RAID 5 to a single 18TB disk for my second machine. Second, because the old one still lives at a remote location and is a mirror of the new one. There will be a point when the old one is full but i can get cheap 8TB drives by then. Not the point.
The point is that one 18TB drive (with a flash cache disk in front) satisfies my performance and capacity needs. It could fail and be offline until the new part arrives and has re-synced or restored the data onto it. But for a home server i can live with that. Backup in general is cheaper than actual redundancy, and you need backups anyway.
Anyway, with energy cost and living-room-compatibility (a.k.a. WAF) in mind, smaller systems make a lot of sense.
Overkill much? What most people "need" is 2 to 4 drives and what works best (as in is cheapest and gets the job done) is an externel Disk encloser with JBOD mode over USB (USB 3.1 Gen 1 is enough) or eSATA something like a FANTEC QB-35US3-6G, IB-3640SU3 (both ron fine even on a Rasberry Pi 4 with Open Media Vault) or a Orico DS500U3 if you need 5 drives. You can even go as far as run a Icy Box IB-3810U3 for 10 drives but at that point I would consider your overkill as the better alternative.
Not having a super-high IT affinity myself, I built a backup server myself during covid. I chose an old Supermicro server with dual Xeon V2. It has been in service now for years, seems super-reliable without any issues. Following level1techs videos for years now, I know now that 'RAID is dead'. However, mine still uses RAID 1 on 12 SAS-drives with 10GbE and as it is ultra-reliable it will probably the last RAID system on earth 🪦. It will probably outlive me.
Just a tipp for building a chassis for a homeserver: Use an old (like 10+ years) ATX Big Tower case which has a lot of 5.25" slots in the front, and then get disk cages which convert those to 3.5" disk bays, and voilà you get something very close to the HL15, for way less. Sure you can't mount it in a Rack, but as far as I can tell, not many people use Racks if they have a highly converged homeserver which runs all of their stuff. I use an old Lian Li Big tower that I got used for about 40$ which has 12 5.25" slots. It houses 12 drives + room for more, and has proper front to back cooling like a regular Diskshelf/Serverchassis.
One big thing to keep in mind is, that only about 3% of the worlds population lives in the US, so using of the shelf ATX cases is usually way easier and cheaper then something like an HL15 chassis.
There are quite a few reports of JBODs (many QNAP I think) reporting failures of bad sectors check on new drives (LSI HBA) which disappeared with non-MS01 hosts. Not sure if there is now a fix for that or it was not tested extensively in this video or PEBKAC?
I put together a desktop to hold 12 hdds and currently am using 2 lol. I guess I really don't have that much data I need on server at home. I guess I am rather future proof and can swap the motherboard as I find better stuff in the trash.
Targeted the MS-01 just for this cause. Retiring a HP 360P Gen9 as the head unit ontop of the diskshelf. Working flawlessly since implementation
The old Antec Twelve Hundred gaming case has 12 5.25" open drive bays in the front. Each bay can hold 8 hot-swap NVME drives. 96 drives anyone?
This is Master-blaster
Heard about tye Oxidation flaw in Intel's new chips fitted on these PCs?
I'm not sure why you recommended this MS-01. The forums are full of this thing crashing randomly and people returning the MS-01
Where is the A1 version? There is next to no information on when that will be out
Personally i ran JBODs for years, they often just works. I plan on using a TR-D800S at home for my MS-01, i just need storage with my system. I don't need gpu and if i do i can get a machine for that. So far JBOD from QNAP has done the job perfect for me as i don't hit the limite on speed with my home network right now plus my apple tv for my tv for watching movies is only 1GBE so yeah i will be fine for a good while
Absolute crap quality. Died just 2 months after using it. I already had problems on Installation. Never again Minis-Forum.
Wish Minisforum come out with a updated workstation, wondering when that will be.
Do you communicate with Dave's Garage? You two could make an interesting video.
250w idle is insanely high. It's why I don't use my disk shelves
Wendell is the premium tech support for other tech youtubers 🙂
probably the best and most simple breakdown of sata vs. sas! thanks!
Please stop recommending minisofurm and similar to your large audience without pointing out they have a nearly non existent bios update track record and all their devices are basically vulnerable from the bios level since every few months there’s new cpu and bios vulnerabilities post specter
Might it possible, to attach two nodes on that shelf and have some sort of failover? Like the netapp Ontap software does?
Would love to get a deep dive in ASPM territory and how to always hit c8 with what components
I feel so lucky to have an old lenovo SA120 for this exact use.
Here I was expecting to see how to connect like 6 drives to the minisforum.
But I should've known better – BAM GOLIATH DISK SHELF'D
This video made me miss working at NetApp 🙁
10:02 — "Make sure that you've got a Plan B."
That's exactly my Golden Rule #1 for Hardware Architecture design and planning.
For us puny peon non-hyperscalers, having double or triple sets of matched hardware and firmware at the ready seems essential.
Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
11:30 — errors "as a result of cabling or signal issues."
3:33 — "SATA wasn't designed to push cables this long."
Thank you 👍
Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
This is exactly what I'm doing using a node 804 with disks on both side of the chassis. Its cheap because I already had it
So, here is why I chose the 45HomeLab HL15. I could not find one of the mini machines that has ECC RAM. I run TrueNAS on mine and thus ZFS. I also didn't want the headaches that come with building all this stuff and finding all the roadblocks on my own.
Is there any casing from AliExpress that does a 24* u.2 drive ?
Does this <minipc> setup supports ECC RAM?
I miss the old intro music
6:20 – Why would you call it SAS6 if it's SAS2 6Gb/s, SAS3 is latest generation that supports 12Gb/s… I understand why it might be more convenient, but that's terrible to mix naming conventions like that
Waiting for Jonsbo n5 to be available so I can build my media server.
Please let mechanical drives die already. Let them go! Be free in the annals of history. Yes the cost is still much less, but so is the performance in speed, power, and data safety. If you have a real need for a large storage array, you can most probably justify the extra cost of SATA/SAS SSD or even NVMe. It has been years since I stopped using HDDs and SATA SSDs in favor of all NVMe for everything, both in a professional and personal contexts. The more we use NVMe the cheaper it gets. We now have 60TB single 2.5" NVMe drives with 128TB announced. Using monstrosities like that NetApp drive shelf is a disservice to the environment. the only place that belongs in is in a recycling stream, and maybe a museum soon.
If you put that LSI card in the ms-01 you need to add a fan. That card overheats in that computer without airflow.
WD just announced 32+64TB nvme ssds for Q3/24 and for next year 128TB and the year after 256TB capacities, we might get capacity vs price run up that could benefit the user, can not wait to consolidate all my archives dvds and external drives on a mini pc with two U.2/U.3
How does the MS01 handle the heat generated by those cards? That’s my main concern.
From a pure cost perspective, everyone interested in setups like these should take a mental step back and ask if more than 6 drives are really necessary.
No, really. First impulse is "this looks nice, finally unlimited space for drives, hot-swapping and industry grade hardware!".
And we all see the appeal. But for the money most of us are better off with a (potentially multiple) smaller machine(s).
For my last NAS i went from 4x 3TB in RAID 5 to a single 18TB disk for my second machine. Second, because the old one still lives at a remote location and is a mirror of the new one. There will be a point when the old one is full but i can get cheap 8TB drives by then. Not the point.
The point is that one 18TB drive (with a flash cache disk in front) satisfies my performance and capacity needs. It could fail and be offline until the new part arrives and has re-synced or restored the data onto it. But for a home server i can live with that. Backup in general is cheaper than actual redundancy, and you need backups anyway.
Anyway, with energy cost and living-room-compatibility (a.k.a. WAF) in mind, smaller systems make a lot of sense.
Yay. I was researching something like this.
Thanks for creating a video.
Could you daisy chain JBODs and have more than 24 Disks?
Overkill much? What most people "need" is 2 to 4 drives and what works best (as in is cheapest and gets the job done) is an externel Disk encloser with JBOD mode over USB (USB 3.1 Gen 1 is enough) or eSATA something like a FANTEC QB-35US3-6G, IB-3640SU3 (both ron fine even on a Rasberry Pi 4 with Open Media Vault) or a Orico DS500U3 if you need 5 drives. You can even go as far as run a Icy Box IB-3810U3 for 10 drives but at that point I would consider your overkill as the better alternative.
Not having a super-high IT affinity myself, I built a backup server myself during covid. I chose an old Supermicro server with dual Xeon V2. It has been in service now for years, seems super-reliable without any issues. Following level1techs videos for years now, I know now that 'RAID is dead'. However, mine still uses RAID 1 on 12 SAS-drives with 10GbE and as it is ultra-reliable it will probably the last RAID system on earth 🪦. It will probably outlive me.
Just a tipp for building a chassis for a homeserver:
Use an old (like 10+ years) ATX Big Tower case which has a lot of 5.25" slots in the front, and then get disk cages which convert those to 3.5" disk bays, and voilà you get something very close to the HL15, for way less.
Sure you can't mount it in a Rack, but as far as I can tell, not many people use Racks if they have a highly converged homeserver which runs all of their stuff.
I use an old Lian Li Big tower that I got used for about 40$ which has 12 5.25" slots. It houses 12 drives + room for more, and has proper front to back cooling like a regular Diskshelf/Serverchassis.
One big thing to keep in mind is, that only about 3% of the worlds population lives in the US, so using of the shelf ATX cases is usually way easier and cheaper then something like an HL15 chassis.
Are the more modern disk shelfs more power efficient? 250 watt idle is crazy 💀
There are quite a few reports of JBODs (many QNAP I think) reporting failures of bad sectors check on new drives (LSI HBA) which disappeared with non-MS01 hosts. Not sure if there is now a fix for that or it was not tested extensively in this video or PEBKAC?
I put together a desktop to hold 12 hdds and currently am using 2 lol. I guess I really don't have that much data I need on server at home. I guess I am rather future proof and can swap the motherboard as I find better stuff in the trash.
This is something i was looking at doing. Purely because of all the IO in the box. But then i also wanted a full GPU which is the main annoyance.
Id have to use a pcie nvme to pcie x16 for the controller and have the gpu off an riser as well.
Alternatively building something with the chip in it.
10w per drive in idle, nogo.
I love my HL15 but I really wish they would make one that supports 30 hard drives
I am using the front off an HP DL380P LFF as a disk shelf/jbod and an LSI 9208 (maybe) to hook it to my server. Write up on the L1 forums. 😂