Hi all
i am looking to expand my storage capacity in my OMV box, i have a fractal designs Node 804 case which houses 12 6tb drives. i have an asrock 2750 board with a two port pci sata card. I have no room left in the case to fit any more drives so i had a couple of thoughts and options being below
i dont have any raid or fancy drive pooling, just loads of drives, root folder for each and lots of files..!
expansion means i need to get myself an SAS extender card which i have been looking at LSI megaraid 9240i to expand the available sata ports available
the OMV box is on 24/7 and on a UPS, it only gets turned off if i have to move house or put more drives in
i have 10 plex devices on wan/lan for family and my machine will happily play for at least half of them at the same time. (everything in the house is direct play)
So my options from what i can see are as follows
1. buy a full tower case to house more drives in or a rackmount array style case, move the board and existing drives into it. ditch the fractal case
2. buy another fractal case, insert new drives into this along with a modified power supply and run the sas cable from the card in box one to box 2 (round the back!) (making this effectively a dumb box of drives)
3. Create another OMV box with shares on etc and running some services (so example box one could run plex, box two could do my downloading etc) in the second fractal case, i have a board and i7 chip and memory to do this.
Questions!
if i went for option one, i would have an ugly white box which doesnt actually utilise all the space inside. (server sits in my office no basement data centre for me)
option two seems feasible, i would modify the switch to open the pins on the psu to allow the drives to spin up. but the cable would be just routed out of one box into the other. plus in the event of a shutdown, the disks would stay on, on the second box.
option three seems a good idea but two lots of powering boards, two GUIs, if i could do this, i would need a way to sync them harmoniously i.e drives 1-12 have folders 1-12 and i can see them in plex for example when creating new categories, i would need to be able to mount the drives as if they were in box one, so would i use NFS for this, and can i use an automount for the drives that are in box two (remember no raid or fancy stuff needed) i understand i would have a bottleneck in the SAS port but all the disks may not be accessed at the same time and i think my bottleneck would always be my network.
so i would add mountpoints to box one for drive 13,14,15 etc wherreas in option 2 for all intents and purposed they are on the same instance of OMV (just not in the box as such!)
thanks all for advice etc in advance