2018-05-25, 19:59
My solution was a bit different.
The base machine is an old Z170 board with a Pentium G3450; it manages a 12 HDD RAID6 using software raid (controller is a LSI SAS 2008 plus a 16 port SAS expander, €60 on eBay).
The MD raid is then mounted via iSCSI/RDMA (over a 10GBE twinax "crossover") on a (smaller but powerful) linux server that does filesystem management (XFS), shares and the like.
It might seem a bit overkill but it's actually cheap, it's damn expandable and it's great gym to work with linux and networking.
Network cards are an old Mellanox ConnectX-2 (they are pretty cheap, same goes for the twinax cable) and a bit more expensive Marvell (that has two connectors instead of one).
The base machine is an old Z170 board with a Pentium G3450; it manages a 12 HDD RAID6 using software raid (controller is a LSI SAS 2008 plus a 16 port SAS expander, €60 on eBay).
The MD raid is then mounted via iSCSI/RDMA (over a 10GBE twinax "crossover") on a (smaller but powerful) linux server that does filesystem management (XFS), shares and the like.
It might seem a bit overkill but it's actually cheap, it's damn expandable and it's great gym to work with linux and networking.
Network cards are an old Mellanox ConnectX-2 (they are pretty cheap, same goes for the twinax cable) and a bit more expensive Marvell (that has two connectors instead of one).