​So you're the one the government has employed to retain all of our browsing data.

Just when I think, I've got a problem, I meet you. God bless you sir

I have a case very similar to this

https://www.xcase.co.uk/collections/4u-rackmount-cases/products/x-case-extra-value-rm-424-24-hotswap-bays

Running with a decent motherboard with 8GB of ram. To deal with drive connections I have an Areca card similar to this.

https://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=N82E16816151027

Which handles all do the drive control as otherwise it would need multiple Sata control card which gets messy (if your motherboard can even handled the multiple cards needed) and even more expensive.

I then have a total of 23 WD Reds and the one 8TB Seagate giving 100TB of unformatted storage and approximately 91TB of formatted storage.

This server then sits in a full height server rack which houses my home theatre PC, Amp and games consoles as everything in the house is wired into that cupboard via network switches and a 4x4 av matrix meaning I can watch/play everything in most rooms around the house.

It's a big system but I've slowly built up to it over the years starting with small NASs then going to small HP home server, then extender boxes and HP micro servers. This was the most cost effective and least power hungry setup in the end and suits my needs perfectly and it will never need replacing as a whole as drives can be swapped out easily and complements replaced in the event of any failures.

I wouldn't trust a Seagate, let alone with 8tb of my data.

I wouldn't trust a Seagate, let alone with 8tb of my data.

I've been using one of these for 18 months in my 100TB media server and it's been bullet proof. I paid £183 for mine back then so this is the closest it's been again since. I'm still got 28TB capacity so I'm good for now but will definitely take a look at these when the time comes

​Haha. A standard bluray is 50GB (most are dual layer to fit extra audio tracks and extras on). A 100TB server will fit 2048 of those on it. That's just movies. Take into account FLAC music albums, TV shows and RAW picture albums and you've filled that space up fairly quickly.

Some people just want maximum quality, this drive is a great drive whether in NAS or Desktop.

I have had 3 seagate drives fail within 1 year in my nas swapped them all out with WD Reds and been going strong for almost 3 years now.

Just when I think, I've got a problem, I meet you. God bless you sir

Just doing the maths. :smile:

*My NAS is 15TB RAID 5, but different strokes, different folks I guess? :wink:

not cheap at all, I got mine for 166 few months ago from Novatech
The price has been hovering around 179 anyway
200 is definitely not a deal

Post up some pics and details of your monster kit!

Indeed. I store all of my blurays in an uncompressed format because I can. I actually in use this server for video but it works perfectly for me

Got one in my PC, still got some 96GB of free space left. :-)

I have a case very similar to this

https://www.xcase.co.uk/collections/4u-rackmount-cases/products/x-case-extra-value-rm-424-24-hotswap-bays

Running with a decent motherboard with 8GB of ram. To deal with drive connections I have an Areca card similar to this.

https://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=N82E16816151027

Which handles all do the drive control as otherwise it would need multiple Sata control card which gets messy (if your motherboard can even handled the multiple cards needed) and even more expensive.

I then have a total of 23 WD Reds and the one 8TB Seagate giving 100TB of unformatted storage and approximately 91TB of formatted storage.

This server then sits in a full height server rack which houses my home theatre PC, Amp and games consoles as everything in the house is wired into that cupboard via network switches and a 4x4 av matrix meaning I can watch/play everything in most rooms around the house.

It's a big system but I've slowly built up to it over the years starting with small NASs then going to small HP home server, then extender boxes and HP micro servers. This was the most cost effective and least power hungry setup in the end and suits my needs perfectly and it will never need replacing as a whole as drives can be swapped out easily and complements replaced in the event of any failures.

Totally. These drives are a whole new format compared to earlier and smaller capacity drives. People take what they read as gospel. Need to realise that not everything they read on the web isn't always true

Sorry. Forgot to reply directly to you. Have now posted some specs/pics of my media server setup

Hope you're prepared for about a dozen responses making porn jokes. :confused:

Who downloads porn anymore.

I wander lonely as a cloud.......poems don't take up hardly any space at all.

Some people just down have the bandwidth to be streaming 4k.

Who watches 4k porn. Surely those people are going blind anyway so 720p would be fine

And I have used seagate exclusively for almost 15 years without a single failure. What’s your point?

Our department supports 15,000 desktop PC's and 100 servers and Seagate failures are at a similar rate to WD. We replace around 5 a week.

Why would that be?

Because Seagate drives used to be unreliable. But it is no longer the case.

Nice, got a very siliar setup in the same case (use 2x IBM M1015 cards + motherboard sata). Idles ~ 60w in spindown with a couple of VMs running. I'd love a multi-output HDbaseT video card to run Kodi as VMs, but they don't seem to have appeared.

Have about 15 of these Seagate drives - they've all been rock solid.

The matrix option works very well and I can easily stream to 10 players at once if required without the matrix over cat5e

Glad to see all the haters out in storm.

Some of us users need the storage, or want it. It's no different to buying a Ferrari California when you can get a Fiat Punto.

Same haters crawl out of the woodwork on GTX 1080 deals and the sort, and 4K monitor deals. Does make for some interesting reading. :wink:

I've had 1 fail out of 4. Other 3 still whirring away

Let us know when WD REDs come down to this price :smile:

Oh, WOW!
Never thought of something like this. Thought it would be way too expensive for home use.
Time to ditch all the Microservers & consolidate.
Just had, an internal, power supply go in an 8-bay Drobo. Dreading how much that's going to cost, if it can be repaired.

Yes to be honest small NASs are great until you out grow them and then the usual response is to just buy another NAS or enclosure and string them together but to be honest this ends up using more power than a large server.

A large server doesn't suit everyone as they are not exactly small, but if you have space for them they are far more expandable AND they can run on Windows 7 or above or if you want a true server environment, picking up a. Copy of Windows Home Server 2011 is advisable.

This is actually my second server or this style and that now resides in my second property as off site backup which gives ultimate peace of mind. In truth when servers get to this size, unless you want to reply on expensive raid arrays there isn't a simple way to backup or keep safe this amount of data

I'm not entirely convinced on that one - particularly as you have the granularity to switch some of the smaller units off (suppose you could dabble with MAID). If you optimise it you might have a chance but comparing my supermicro base unit to the equivalent number of microservers its the latter that consumes less power by my calc.

Nice rack !

I was running two micro servers prior to this and they used. Ore power in spin up and weren't as well organised as this setup. Only drives in use spin up so 23 drives spin down. It's of the time when the server is in us. Plus the server is woken when required and sleeps within 5 minutes of the network sensing traffic.

Blurays are compressed. H.264 and H.265 are compression codecs.

You know what I meant.