It is massive overkill actually, but I wanted to load up on high capacity drives so I don't have to worry about expanding later, all the best drives have been taken off the market and what's left is ridiculously priced, I should have done it years ago but this should serve me for 10+ years now like my HP Microserver has done. I still have that for acting as a midgetmedia server/backup mainly, but I will use the SSD NAS as primary storage for things like photos, music, etc with redundancy and permanently spun up. It's very simple to get Unraid running and benefit from the parity drives vs trying to set up similar in Windows. Then everything on it will be backed up to the HP NAS anyway and my main rig will just need a couple of fast NVMe sticks for Windows, apps and games. Maybe in ten years or so NAND storage will be much larger and cheaper and I can replace all the HDDs, that would be the dream.

ah I was assuming you were using it for a media server etc.

that's a lot of storage for backups/photos etc. :-o


(is it all midget porn?)

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.

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

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

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!

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)

Why not do 120 in parallel from the get go?

Do you run all those SAS drives as JBOD or in some kind of RAID array?

welllllllllll

formatted first bunch of drives (low lvl format takes forever)

swapped leads over to second lot... set gemini to format them... it said they're already formatted to 512byte no need to format... that's werid, is what is it...

swapped leads over to the next set... they're already done too?

made it re-check... was gemini f**king up, they all need formatting

takes a few days for each batch to format even doing loads in parralel


I was doing 24 in parallel before... then bumped it up to 60.... now just doing 120 a time

sod waiting


also... whytf did I buy so many drives :-o

for me... I'm mostly doing random little one off things I'll never have to do again... couple of times if I need to restart/shutdown etc. I've told it to make a log file of what we've done so can pickup where we left off (learnt that the hard way)

I basically have to use it for work now (management decisions), the models have come on a long way in the last year to the point that they are actually useful for tasks and not just single operations or questions. I'm using Claude Code and It's saved me a lot of time on things I'm perfectly capable of doing but it can output much faster, I still have to check everything to make sure its legit, make the odd correction here and there, but I do really like the fact that you can give it a task and just leave it running and doing its thing and it will resolve problems along the way. I'd never pay my own money to use it, though.

The key thing with using AI is to remember that not only can it hallucinate, you're not guaranteed reproducible results exactly the same way. The best thing you could do is ask it to write you a script to do exactly what you just described. Make scripts, tools, things you can use that mean you don't need to rely on AI in future or hope that it works the same way next time. That's the real power, giving you power back by saving you time on kitting you out, not replacing you altogether. Vibe coding and pumping slop to live sites, no. Making scripts, tools, prototypes, designing, parroting, yes all good.