the first time I did this (few years back) there was less info around and I didn't really know what I was doing in linux, I formatted 24 drives, each one manually

I did 4 at a time in 4 different terminal windows... had no idea if that was ok to do or not but it worked

next time round (not as long ago) I read up on other people parallel formatting drives, forums said format as many drives as you have cpu cores, think that system was 14 physical cores so I did 14 at a time

but then from my own digging/testing, you don't need to control/feed the format of sas drives... you tell the sas drive to format then it does it on it's owm

when I told gemini to do that (easier than doing cli myself) to warned about doing a full shelf at once and wanted to do 12...  got bored of that tho so 24 it was


I was using 3 of the shelves for cctv storage... got exited on ebay and bought more (but never connected up) then few months later forgot I'd bought them, got excited and bought more on ebay... seller reached out to me, he was the IT guy somewhere, was sick of tripping over them and had more he wanted shot of - they were using them but upgraded when they moved premises.

then I decided it was a bit silly powering them, bought a bunch of 20tb drives to fill an empty shelf I got from IT guy

then hard drive prices have gone crazy... I paid £100 to £200 for each shelf of 24x4tb... now on ebay they're on for £1400

just listed mine at £800 fingers crossed someone wants them!

(it's a long story spread over about 10 years)

I've been looking to build an SSD-based NAS, wish i'd bought some 8TB SSDs a while back as you can't even get them now outside of NVMe form and it's ridiculous money now. I have one 8TB SSD and I'm about to get 4x 4TB MX500s from CeX because you can't get decent high capacity SSDs now and that's likely my best option now, even though I really wanted 8TB drives. I could go the Server U.2 route but looking on eBay they want silly money for those too. I should have done it a couple of years ago but who knew. At least you'll be quids in if these all sell!

so... why do you want all ssd ?  no spinning drives?

I'd wait for the crazy prices to some down if I were you!

More reliable, faster, no concerns about spinning up/down disks, etc. I will keep a HDD based NAS for long term storage of films and such but use the SSD NAS as a more general home server instead of relying on storing data locally. I've upgraded some of my network to 2.5Gb and will eventually go 10Gb.

I would wait but I really want those MX500s before they disappear completely. Last of the Crucial SSDs with exceptionally reliable controllers, I don't really trust other brands as much.