Here is a fun little hack - Still using the USB to boot - Use a USB to SATA converter and an old laptop hard drive for your boot disk. If you can find an old disk with decent capacity, you even get some usable space for installing applications without eating into your storage.
I'm running old PCs with Athlon X2 and SATA2 as a NAS with a MB that has two 1Gb NICs. Perfectly fine if the home network is just 1Gb Ethernet. Never going to transfer more than 1.2Gb/sec SATA2.
it should ... I am running a 16 TB drive as my parity drive right now (4.3 GB of data used at the moment) - and I plan to replace my 2 2TB drives with 8TB drives soon ... if you're using this exact machine, you should definitely consider the modified BIOS I go over in the video - among other things, it will allow for the SATA interface to live up to it's potential and take the (stock) 1.5 Gbps transfer rate to a max 3.0Gbps (modified BIOS)
My home build NAS's (yes I have more than 1) use Mini-ITX Intel 4th gen H87I-Plus motherboards, they have 6 SATA ports. Power consumption is typically in the range 20 to 30 Watts.
Thank you this is a good overview of what is possible with old hardware. It would be interesting to compare the power consumption over time and a pros/cons review once you're done to see how you find the overall experience. Thanks for sharing!
let me know what specifically you're interested in (in terms of pwr consumption) - I hooked the system up to a "Kill A Watt" to test consumption (HDD vs SSD, etc.) and found that I had plenty of room to grow ... so I plan to add a few SATA pwr splitters in order to accommodate more drives in the future
I know that I'm couple of years late to the party, but it looks like you can upgrade the enclosure to SAS drives by replacing the backplane's SAS cable and getting an additional SAS RAID card. N20L backplane has removable SATA connectors and is upgradable to DELL PowerEdge T110 SAS cable with Mini-SAS SFF-8087 (p/n 0VM72C) with some modifications. I have confirmed that built in connector doesn't support SAS.
I think you may right ... worth looking into for sure - the N40L MB has a SAS connector that feeds the 4 bay SATA backplane ... and although the HD connectors are SAS compatible, it seems to only support SATA (fine by me) - but change it out and/or use a card and you may just go with SAS drives instead ... 👍
@@HaukesProjects The 36/40/54Ls backplane and cabling does support SAS. However, the onboard control only supports SATA. So a SAS HBA/RAID PCIE controller needs to be added.
Here is a fun little hack - Still using the USB to boot - Use a USB to SATA converter and an old laptop hard drive for your boot disk. If you can find an old disk with decent capacity, you even get some usable space for installing applications without eating into your storage.
interesting idea ...
I'm running old PCs with Athlon X2 and SATA2 as a NAS with a MB that has two 1Gb NICs. Perfectly fine if the home network is just 1Gb Ethernet. Never going to transfer more than 1.2Gb/sec SATA2.
precisely ... 😉
Thanks for your video. Does the machine support hard drives for each larger then 4TB? Thanks.
it should ... I am running a 16 TB drive as my parity drive right now (4.3 GB of data used at the moment) - and I plan to replace my 2 2TB drives with 8TB drives soon ... if you're using this exact machine, you should definitely consider the modified BIOS I go over in the video - among other things, it will allow for the SATA interface to live up to it's potential and take the (stock) 1.5 Gbps transfer rate to a max 3.0Gbps (modified BIOS)
My home build NAS's (yes I have more than 1) use Mini-ITX Intel 4th gen H87I-Plus motherboards, they have 6 SATA ports.
Power consumption is typically in the range 20 to 30 Watts.
awesome - another decade old piece of hardware given a new lease on life ... 👍
Thank you this is a good overview of what is possible with old hardware. It would be interesting to compare the power consumption over time and a pros/cons review once you're done to see how you find the overall experience. Thanks for sharing!
let me know what specifically you're interested in (in terms of pwr consumption) - I hooked the system up to a "Kill A Watt" to test consumption (HDD vs SSD, etc.) and found that I had plenty of room to grow ... so I plan to add a few SATA pwr splitters in order to accommodate more drives in the future
I know that I'm couple of years late to the party, but it looks like you can upgrade the enclosure to SAS drives by replacing the backplane's SAS cable and getting an additional SAS RAID card. N20L backplane has removable SATA connectors and is upgradable to DELL PowerEdge T110 SAS cable with Mini-SAS SFF-8087 (p/n 0VM72C) with some modifications. I have confirmed that built in connector doesn't support SAS.
I think you may right ... worth looking into for sure - the N40L MB has a SAS connector that feeds the 4 bay SATA backplane ... and although the HD connectors are SAS compatible, it seems to only support SATA (fine by me) - but change it out and/or use a card and you may just go with SAS drives instead ... 👍
@@HaukesProjects The 36/40/54Ls backplane and cabling does support SAS. However, the onboard control only supports SATA. So a SAS HBA/RAID PCIE controller needs to be added.
@@Yandarval thanks for verifying this ... I thought as much