DIY Sia storage farm
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@coinmonkey Buying refurbished equipment is a good option, though potential buyers should know that the maximum storage/drive capacity of "legacy" equipment might be limited (up to 42 TB, or just 5 TB drives, for the model series you link to).
PS: Could you please remove your second post, however, as it just adds noise to this thread. A link is sufficient. Thanks!
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@HoteiLife said:
Any thoughts on using external USB hard drive enclosures?
For convenience, I would personally prefer a single enclosure, like a full-size tower or something. If you need to expand what a tower or rack module can hold, however, external enclosures is a good idea. Are there enclosures that fit multiple drives but does not force on your RAID? i.e. 1 volume per drive.
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@in-cred-u-lous said:
For convenience, I would personally prefer a single enclosure, like a full-size tower or something. If you need to expand what a tower or rack module can hold, however, external enclosures is a good idea. Are there enclosures that fit multiple drives but does not force on your RAID? i.e. 1 volume per drive.
There are, but they all seem to be more expensive per drive. Even the USB 2.0 enclosures without RAID. Here's a 4 drive enclosure for $380, which is $95/drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AJ35C4582There's an 8 drive enclosure for $300, which makes $37.50/drive, still over the $13/drive for single drive enclosures:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA8T93RU6064For whatever reason the single drive enclosures are seemingly the cheapest option by a large margin.
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@HoteiLife said:
For whatever reason the single drive enclosures are seemingly the cheapest option by a large margin.
An alternative option to USB enclosures is external SATA enclosures which is a lot faster:
http://smile.amazon.com/Vantec-Inches-Aluminum-Mobile-MRK-M2512T/dp/B00IAUP3OK ($9 / drive)
http://smile.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-HDDRACK5-5-Bay-Organizing/dp/B001LF40KE ($7.50 / drive)Edit: I read the reviews of these and the first option sounds really bad and probably best avoided. Maybe there are better options but I could find none.
The first option is for 2.5" drives, which can be useful if you have a bunch of these around (from old laptops, external drives etc). You can't daisychain SATA drives though so you still need controller boards with additional eSATA/SATA breakouts.
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@in-cred-u-lous said:
An alternative option to USB enclosures is external SATA enclosures which is a lot faster:
http://smile.amazon.com/Vantec-Inches-Aluminum-Mobile-MRK-M2512T/dp/B00IAUP3OK ($9 / drive)
http://smile.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-HDDRACK5-5-Bay-Organizing/dp/B001LF40KE ($7.50 / drive)The first option is for 2.5" drives, which can be useful if you have a bunch of these around (from old laptops, external drives etc). You can't daisychain SATA drives though so you still need controller boards with additional eSATA/SATA breakouts.
Nice, with cooling & designed to be stackable. I like it. I think you can get USB to SATA adapters. But what they would cost & how many you could get connected total I don't know.
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Guess you can also get splitters to share single SATA ports among multiple drives. Again at what point the SATA channel becomes saturated is a consideration. Here's a 1-to-4 splitter:
http://smile.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-Mini-SAS-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC/
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@HoteiLife said:
I think you can get USB to SATA adapters. But what they would cost & how many you could get connected total I don't know.
The ones I've seen are all 1-to-1 and I'm not sure they're bidirectional either... In any case, you loose the speed advantage of SATA.
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@HoteiLife said:
Guess you can also get splitters to share single SATA ports among multiple drives. Again at what point the SATA channel becomes saturated is a consideration. Here's a 1-to-4 splitter:
http://smile.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-Mini-SAS-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC/Guess that's not right. It's a SCSI-to-SATA splitter.
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@HoteiLife said:
@HoteiLife said:
Guess you can also get splitters to share single SATA ports among multiple drives. Again at what point the SATA channel becomes saturated is a consideration. Here's a 1-to-4 splitter:
http://smile.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-Mini-SAS-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC/Guess that's not right. It's a SCSI-to-SATA splitter.
Correct, SATA can't be split/daisychained. You need 1 port on the controller per drive. The cables you linked to is SAS to SATA. I think Intel makes different 6 port SAS cards which you could use these cables with to get 4 x 6 = 24 SATA channels on a single board. These boards are ~$250. These are probably ideal for RAID arrangements. Otherwise, the 4-channel SATA controllers I mention in my first post would be cheaper.
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@in-cred-u-lous said:
Correct, SATA can't be split/daisychained. You need 1 port on the controller per drive. The cables you linked to is SAS to SATA. I think Intel makes different 6 port SAS cards which you could use these cables with to get 4 x 6 = 24 SATA channels on a single board. These boards are ~$250. These are probably ideal for RAID arrangements. Otherwise, the 4-channel SATA controllers I mention in my first post would be cheaper.
I've seen port multipliers for SATA. This thread discusses using a 1-to-5 multiplier & says you can go 4 multipliers deep:
http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/360/can-i-attach-a-sata-controllerThere's one for sale there:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1JM2FM0733But I'm inclined to go USB. It's designed to connect large numbers of devices.
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@HoteiLife said:
I've seen port multipliers for SATA.
But I'm inclined to go USB. It's designed to connect large numbers of devices.For a stable system you want to reduce potential points of failure, meaning eliminating things such as adapters and external multiplier cards IMO.
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At $1-$2/T/month there's a lot of risk involved trying to be a host. First of all it takes a lot of time for ROI if you compare to mining the right crypto for example. If after 6 months one of your big disks fails it's gonna take you even longer to get ROI, let alone make some money. Initial cost of hardware is pretty high as well if you want a decent rack/server and compete like a boss. With that comes a higher electricity cost and you're not even guaranteed that all your space will be rent out through smart contracts. Most likely you'll be happy that 1/3 of your space is used all the time the first year since release. About 3,8% of your potential profit goes to Sia as well? Seems fair and I have no problem with it, but it's another little chunk that gets eaten out of your potential profit.
I'm a system specialist and obviously I'm interested in building a storage server as well using SIA because I like the concept, but man the ROI seems long and the returns minimal. :(
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@SteamboatG Until the network grows, I think you will be competitive at $3 - $4/TB/mo. If you want real profit, you would want to minimize risk through averaging by scaling. But yeah, still high risk as no-one really knows how big Sia will grow.
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@in-cred-u-lous I think we also need to factor in collateral. Does it depend on the host's discretion or is there a set amount each host must put up per TB. I've read somewhere that it's roughly 2x the contract price / month / TB and also 3x that if you're looking at the minimum 12wk contract. Is that accurate?
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Has anyone looked at an Odroid C2 as a low power device to attach some USB drives to? It seems to be x64 compatible, but Im not technical enough to be certain http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=18771
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I'm wondering about older server hardware. You know, one of those that goes in a rack with hotswappable drives in the front. They can be had rather cheap.
Ofcourse you'd need to make sure that the motherboard isn't from the 1990s and stuff.
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@EvoSteven said in DIY Sia storage farm:
I'm wondering about older server hardware. You know, one of those that goes in a rack with hotswappable drives in the front. They can be had rather cheap.
Ofcourse you'd need to make sure that the motherboard isn't from the 1990s and stuff.
They tend to be power hungry, so I guess it depends how cheap....
