I was thinking 'modern classic', though the window for that must shift constantly.

Side note, I keep seeing old 7 series like the one I had before on FB marketplace and thinking I want one with all the gubbins, phone, fridges, curtains, etc. but then I come back to reality and realise I'd struggle to even park one on my current driveway and I rarely go anywhere as I WFH! So I'm still kind of thinking a Boxster will become my modern classic...

Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on April 23, 2026, 16:24:01 PMI'm glad you're keeping it going, I bet there's not that many on the roads in as good a condition actually. Is it now considered a classic?

I dunno if it's a classic, there's weird subsets of the term like "modern classic" So who knows, but it certainly gets quite a few comments like "don't see many of those around now"

awww... I bought 20x 20tb drives right before the prices shot up... you could have nicked some!

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?