Now that I am starting to make YouTube videos, I need somewhere to store all of the huge Hi-Rez render files, the 2TB drive in my iMac Pro is simply not big enough to use for ongoing storage. It is fine for working on the files locally, but for long term storage, they need somewhere else that is also fast to access and copy in to/out from.
So the idea of a NAS is born, not for the first time I will have you know. I have thought about storing the files on my media server, but with only a 1Gbit interface it takes a while to copy files in and out.
This new NAS is going to require 10Gbit as a minimum and this will also require some additional network infrastructure.
To that end I found a Unifi Aggregation switch on Ebay for £195.00 (retails at around £300.00) so I snapped it up.
I was thinking about using an HP Z420 motherboard (about £45.00) as the backbone of the server with an Intel Xeon E5-2695 v2 (CPU Mark 13497) 2.40GHz 12 core 24 thread CPU (about £50.00). but then I found a SuperMicro X9DRD-iF server motherboard on Ebay with 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630 v2 (CPU Mark 7508) 2.60GHz 6 core 12 thread CPUs and 16GB RAM for £116.00.
This has a built in IPMI interface and more connections than I will probably ever need.
I found a Corsair 460T mid tower case on Facebook Marketplace for £60.00.
The motherboard is X-ATX in size but has a non standard mounting hole pattern, however I still managed to get 6 of the 9 holes to line up in the case.
The case itself is a fair bit bigger than I would have liked, but I can easily fit 16 x 3.5″ SATA drives in it as well as a bunch of 2.5″ OS disks.
I have also bought a ‘3 in 2’ drive bay that allows 3 x 3.5″ drives to be mounted in 2 x 5.25″ bays, this was £29.99 on Ebay.
I already had one LSI 9267-8i HBA, but decided to buy a second one for £22.52 from Ebay, as I was going to need the disk connectivity, I can connect 8 x SATA drives to each of these.
Next I purchased two Solarflare SF329-9021 dual 10GB SFP+ network cards for £17.99 each again from Ebay.
4 x Mini SAS 36P SFF-8087 To 4 SATA cables for £7.06 each from Ebay.
I also bought 4 x Finisar FTLX8571D3BCL 10GBASE-SR 850nm 10GB LC optical transceivers for £19.95 and some 1.5m LC-LC OM3 fibre optic cables for £2.39 each.
The power supply is a Corsair RM750
