I am currently running a FreeBSD system on an old Dell Optiplex 790 (i3 2100) that has been upgraded a bit.

It has 16G of ram, and 5 hard drives: 1TiB SATA SSD, where the OS itself is installed, using UFS+/FFS filesystem.

The other 4 are 3TiB SAS drives, connected to an LSI 9300 HBA, and are in a ZFS raidz1 configuration.

I would prefer to stick with FreeBSD, but would also consider TrueNAS Core (also FreeBSD based).

Here’s the problem. The 5 hard drives don’t quite fit into the case. The side panel won’t close completely due to the SAS connectors being slightly larger than the original SATA connectors the case was designed for.

My budget is sub $300.

I’ve seen a few 2U and 4U servers on eBay that seem to fit the bill. My concern is that energy usage would be significantly higher than it is now.

Any suggestions for alternative ideas that keep my existing storage would be much appreciated.

  • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    1 day ago

    Here’s some non-official stats regarding the DS2246 24 bay system, I imagine you can use them as ballpark figures for the DS212C:

    I happen to have one in my garage and a kill-w-watt type device, so here is my non scientific and non official data for you:
    At 240V with one PSU:
    140W with 24 x 450 GB SAS drives
    56W with 2 x 450 GB SAS drives
    46W with zero drives
    56db sound from 1m with NIOSH SLM on iPhone 8 Plus

    110V tends to be approx 10% more power consumption, but I can’t test that at home (spousal approval was not forthcoming for a stepdown to use US power tools…)
    Hope this helps!

    https://old.reddit.com/r/netapp/comments/czpbw1/ds2246_idle_power_consumption/ez0kbh2/