I have been self-hosting my own data and home services for many years. This includes documents, photos, videos, surveillance, plex, smb, home automation, juniper switch stack, ethernet wiring. The whole works. I’ve also taken all measures to ensure my data is backed up and runs on redundant drives. To this day, I haven’t suffered data loss but I have definitely experienced hardware failure. To maintain this level of redundancy meant a few arrays and backup arrays, UPS and well you know the rest. Just a bunch of safety nets
It has been a wonderful journey of learning and growing. At first I was bold, hosting power hungry compute, storage and cooling. But this year I wanted to scale down in size and power. Why not right? After all, chips are much faster, more efficient and storage …
I have been self-hosting my own data and home services for many years. This includes documents, photos, videos, surveillance, plex, smb, home automation, juniper switch stack, ethernet wiring. The whole works. I’ve also taken all measures to ensure my data is backed up and runs on redundant drives. To this day, I haven’t suffered data loss but I have definitely experienced hardware failure. To maintain this level of redundancy meant a few arrays and backup arrays, UPS and well you know the rest. Just a bunch of safety nets
It has been a wonderful journey of learning and growing. At first I was bold, hosting power hungry compute, storage and cooling. But this year I wanted to scale down in size and power. Why not right? After all, chips are much faster, more efficient and storage is faster and more affordable. All I knew is I wanted something quieter, runs cooler and doesn’t draw too much power. My DIY server rack needed a makeover. It drew about 800w idle during the summer months and a nice 500w during the winter months. It was loud, despite controlling the fans on my HPDL380Gen9 using ILOfans hack.
A while back, I was involved in a datacenter destruction project at the company I work at. We officially moved all our services to cloud. As we sent several things to scrap, i couldn’t possibly toss away our Netapp shelves holding 24, X357A 3.84TB SAS drives. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. So we fast zeroed the ontap drives, got it approved and certified for data destruction and to their new home they went.
This was my moment. I can now have a new array in TrueNAS and rid myself of all the platters keeping my garage warm (just the smaller disks of course). I know I didn’t want another 2U server. If I wanted a quiet 2U server, i have to spend good money on a newer gen unit that promises a quieter operation. I needed something smaller. I operate primarily on container apps for most of what I self host so I knew I didn’t need to invest in a lot of memory or compute power. I decided to scale down to atleast 2 SFF towers with a modest 64Gb ram (when it was cheap) and 10th gen i7 procs. I snagged 2, Z2 G5 SFF workstations on ebay and off I went to rebuild.
But I was still torn. I couldn’t decide on a proper enclosure to house my newly adopted SAS SSDs. No case made me happy. Plenty of storage? no backplane. Backplane? no SAS. SAS? not 12Gbps. 12Gbps SAS 2.5“ backplane? Just 5 drives.... ARGH!. So I decided to build it myself.
I’m not a stranger to power tools and plywood so I drafted my enclosure and start cutting. I spent less time building the enclosure than it took me to decide on the hardware. I snagged small PSU, a strong fan, power switches, cables, 2.5“ sas enclosures by HP, miniSAS cables and an HBA for truenas. Now I’m running at around 250W, I have more storage, enough spare replacement drives and it is all so much quieter. I’ve also automated nightly shutdowns for added power savings!
As you can imagine, one of my Truenas HP Z2 G5 is my primary storage + a few apps here and there. This one carries my HBA. On my 2nd HP Z2 G5, I host my nvidia powered apps and BlueIris VM. For backing up my most precious data, I use zfs snapshot replication and sync, I drop that onto my fattest spindle drive on the 2nd HP. My offsite hdd backup goes to my brother’s house using sftp (securely via IP whitelist for that raw gigabit-upload-speed-goodness).
Here are a few pics of my enclosure build. I hope I make my fellow selfhosters proud!