Comment by scottlamb

> How do you store ~100 TB of content with room to grow without a wide NAS?

In the cloud (S3) or on offline (unpowered HDDs or tapes or optical media) I suppose. Most people just don't store that much content.

> So far none of this seems to solve the problem that is solved quite elegantly by the 1U enterprise box... if only you don't look at the power bill.

What kind of power bill are you talking about? I'd expect the drives to be about 10W each steady state (more when spinning up), so 180W. I'd expect a lower-power motherboard/CPU running near idle to be another 40W (or less). If you have a 90% efficient PSU, then maybe 250W in total.

If you're way more than that, you can probably swap out the old enterprisey motherboard/RAM/CPU/PSU for something more modern and do a lot better. Maybe in the same case.

I'm learning 1U is pretty unpleasant though. E.g. I tried an ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 in a Supermicro CSE-813M. A standard IO panel is higher than 1U. If I remove the IO panel, the motherboard does fit...but the VRM heatsink also was high enough that the top case bows a bit when I put it on. I guess you can get smaller third party VRM heat sinks, but that's another thing to deal with. The CPU cooler options are limited (the Dynatron A42 works, but it's loud when the CPU draws a lot of power). 40mm case fans are also quite loud to move the required airflow. You can buy noctuas or whatever, but they won't really keep it cool. The ones that actually do spin very fast and so are very loud. You must have noticed this too, although maybe you have a spot for the machine where you don't hear the noise all the time.

I'm trying 2U now. I bought and am currently setting up an Innovision AS252-A06 chassis: 8 3.5" hot swap bays, 2U, 520mm depth. (Of course you can have a lot more drives if you go to 2.5" drives, give up hot swap, and/or have room for a deeper chassis.) Less worry about if stuff will fit, more room for airflow without noise.