Hello all, as the title says, I’d like to get to 100TB usable capacity. My current setup is 6x 8TB WD Reds in a RAIDZ2 array under TrueNAS. Usable is about 25TB give or take.

I have roughly $1500 to spend to make this happen but that must include the cost of a new case and drives. Current case is a Node 804 which will be retired. Current mobo is a Supermicro X9SCL with a E3-1220 V2, 16GB of RAM (will upgrade to 64 after this storage upgrade). LSI HBA but can’t remember the model off the top of my head.

Looking to move to a CSE-846 or 847, but not opposed to a more storage dense solution with an 826/827 or 836/837.

I’d like to keep the current drives for now but I’m not opposed to other options. I’m thinking adding either 2x RAIDZ2 arrays with 10TB drives or 1 with 20TB drives.

Does this seem reasonable or feasible for this price range? I’ve found manufacture refurb 10TB drives on eBay but I’m not sure of quality or reliability of seller.

Open to any and all suggestions.

  • JamesTuttle1@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    This is a GREAT price for this type of storage unit, especially considering it’s full of Enterprise hard drives.

    CAUTION: NetApp will require you purchase an expensive license from them to get the full 144TB storage usage. We rad many NetApp servers at the last datacenter I worked at, and selling them was always difficult because NetApp support is really difficult about requests to transfer licenses (atleast they were for us).

    Their licensing is physically built into their hardware, so many functions are blocked without the required licenses. We also discovered that blowing up a disk partition kills the license, as we had to wipe the drives first for security reasons before selling the replaced units.

    Here’s just one of thousands of forum posts from NetApps own website, showing one example of this problem:

    https://community.netapp.com/t5/ONTAP-Discussions/NetApp-licensing/m-p/119703

    • joeschm0e@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      From what I can tell this is just the DS4246 expansion shelf. If it had controllers, there would be a lot more ports on the back. If I remember right, you can repurpose these shelves as a generic SAS jbod. I believe you need to reformat the drives before they will work with anything but a Netapp controller.