Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
So, what did we learn here today? We learned that you don’t need monster money to build a Monster Server (well… you will for the drives)! All in, this server costs under $3,000 USD fully populated with 10 x 4TB drives (the drives accounted for right around $2800.00). The hardware we used is by no means barn burner hardware (all recycled except for RAID Controller) but it performed better than you would have expected (it smoked everything!). Additionally, the system is very easy to manage and having an OS behind the scenes as flexible as OpenMediaVault makes this build even more attractive.
Granted, we saved some money by having plenty of hardware lying around, but you can recycle an older PC and accomplish the same thing. Just make sure you have a case that can accommodate a bunch of drives and a decent controller card to make things easy (there are plenty of controller cards out there that do not require modifying the OS for compatibility). Having Linux manage our RAID array allows us to save a lot of money on the SAS card. We also don’t have to worry about the card dying; as long as we get another card, any card, our array (and data) will be in tact!
