A couple of things I didn't get to in the video if anyone was curious: Noise was about 55dBA @ ~0.5m from the front of the chassis with the disks under full load (array consistency check). At idle it was 45dBA at the same measurement location. (Though one catch is that it was in a small and otherwise empty/echo-y closet, which probably made it measure louder than it would have been in some kind of proper acoustic chamber. Mainly I was concerned with relative measurements, so it served well for that.) It drew about 105W at idle without any HDDs, and ~235W at idle with all 18 HDDs installed. Under full disk load it was almost bang on 300W most of the time. To put the sound in perspective, the previous setup was about 66dbA. That was mostly due to the HP D2600 DAS that was perched on top of the old server. (I had spec'd the server itself to be super quiet. Didn't measure it independently, but it was much quieter than the Dell for sure.) But one important thing with sound levels: The D2600 fans ran faster and were of a much higher pitch and buzzier than those in the T640. So even with the disks working hard, the T640 "felt" far quieter than just that 11dB difference. It's more like a low "woosh", and not distracting or uncomfortable to be around... though of course that's fully down to personal preference/tolerance. I should be posting a follow-up soon, so you can see and hear what I mean. And here it is now: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/icuTqZiBlZfPYoE.html

As for RSYNC backups, I used to do this as a service to small business clients. I'd typically have individual computers do an incremental backup every hour, so no more than an hour's work could be lost. But instead of having daily backups that rolled over every 30 days, I saved them daily, then weekly, then monthly and finally annually. That way, there were multiple pipelines of backups, with different sample rates and different rates of expiry. If nobody noticed a ransomware attack all week, someone would the following Monday, and would have the entire previous week's daily backups to restore from. After going unnoticed for more than a week, the granularity would drop from daily to weekly and so on. The longer it goes unnoticed, the greater the granularity, but that's better than dropping from all to nothing in one day.

Thanks for the vid but please don't gatekeep seller's, it's a really bad look for others who would like to do a project like this or similar, it's really poor form.

You got my subscription after: "... mouth hole on my face..." 17m57s --- Priceless 😂

I think I got the same drives of the same seller - two of them were faulty. One DOA, the other one got bad sectors after my burn in test. I propose you test them. I recorded all the SMART data, put them into a ZFS mirror, filled them to the brink with F3, verified the data, scrubbed the disks and then did a long SMART test. I think that's the most thorough and viable approach.

Hi Scott, excellent video, thanks so much for sharing :) Two comments from my side: - Regarding snapshots, you could use btrfs with built-in snapshots (like on Synology). This way you get free data deduplication and still keep the snapshots principle going, to protect against malware. Data would only be "duplicated" in case of being overwritten by malware. - Not sure if it's an overkill, but I do new HDD burn-in with badblocks -wsv You can choose how many runs etc. Takes quite a long time, but gives good confidence imo. My two cents. Thanks again for the great video!

I’d definitely call those caddies. The things for CD’s back in the day we’d call cassettes.

for the T630/T640 I like using the MB998IP-B (icydock 8 bay 2.5'') and the D P/N 010WY power cable. the 18 bay chassis is a little short on 5.25 space, and comes with a one sata power cable. using the mutli-head power cable saves you needing a power splitter. and the 8-bay icydock has two 8643 mini-SAS connections which are FAR more convenient than using 6 or 8 (especially locking) SATA connectors in such a tight space. the T630 has SAS connectors on the motherboard. though the T640 has oculink, but can be adapted to SAS 8643 fine. (or pcie if you are exceedingly daring)

Wooo love tapes. I manage a LTO8 library that just touched 7PB.

what type of business are you in, that you require so much storage / hardware? is this youtube channel THAT BIG?? Ddo you host services for others? or do you just like big expensive server hardware? :D (like me) I'd love to know

Good video sir! The only thing i wish Dell would enable is Bifrication so we can use those multiple m.2 pcie x16 cards..

I'm always curious about what data people are storing on these servers. All I can think of is video formats, like raw editing videos or like movie storage. What else would you do with it?

Since you are serious about your backups and already have a capable server, then I would definitely split the array at the cost of usable space. Used system, used drives - it's not that hard to have an error on the array and every time it happens it will resilver or scrub. On ZFS maybe 2 RAIDZ2 vdevs or 4 RAIDZ1?

The huge empty slot bay cover will be the basis for stuff like card readers to be added with a bezel change. I have an HP server with a similar feature. if you don't need the PCIE lanes or the cores. Taking out the second CPU will reduce your power bill. You are correct about the CPU 2 expansion slots. You need a second CPU to supply the PCIE lanes for them. A similar deal if you want to use all the RAM slots. A second CPU to use the slots for it.

You forgot power draw numbers, with and without drives. Also, dont salute w ur left hand. Nice video. Thanks.

connected with gigabit and then you are going to move it? instead run a couple cables and make it 10g bonded but other wise plenty of space, nice setup

I usually just batch print all of the labels at the same time, saves all the cutoffs/waste

As soon as you dropped a F bomb I thought "This guy is from the North East" immediately. Instant subscribe.

You might wanna watch out with that sata power splitter for the boot drives, it looks like it's made using those molded sata plugs that are prone to shorting out and catching fire

Split it up into 2 x Raid 6 (z2) 8-wide HDD arrays, with a hot spare each. A single one of those arrays should just saturate a 10gbps nic.

Many people do not take the rebuild time risk into account. I have explained it many times, and often people are not even paying attention. People nowadays are more and more used to social media information overload and they just feel and react. It's funny because in the hard sciences, engineering and business, we used to look funny to the social science students deciding what is true because it "resonated with them" and today it's mainstream. Flash-based SSDs have a pretty bad write speed (out of cache) but can still perform many more IOPS. They are still expensive, but they already 15TB in the mainstream.

I believe that "Sleds" are just a plastic sliding tray with no electrical function like the 12v Hot Swap tray or Caddie. I've heard them referred to as either a Caddie or a SAS Drive Tray. but sleds are just a piece of plastic, which are in most desktop cases.

your show so salute, tip your fedora or what ever you like .. just keep up the interesting stuff! and thanks

Dude, im a little new to the channel here. What the heck are you doing that youll need 400 TB of drive space? Man oh man that's a ton of storage.

The 6 bay drive cage looks like the one I have. I set the fan speed to low (just to get SOME airflow) and you can't really hear the fans. Very low noise. You can hear them if it set to High

What a build!

Could you do video on the scripts you use to do the backup. I use rsync for remote backup, but nothing fancy like you have.

Awesome video, can this host a WordPress site?

How many watts does it pull with all drives connected?

Hi. why you use hba mode with software raid rather than the raid that was on dell bios?

This is going to sound strange, but my back up "server" runs desktop windows. Why? because the back blaze unlimited service is less than $10.00 a month but that service doesn't support server OS's or linux. Right now I have about 50 terabytes of stuff in my media server ( growing very quickly) and its all backed up off sight for less than $10.00 a month.

Have you considered FreeBSD with ZFS?

How about 4x raid z1 with 2 hot spares? Is it even possible to use 1 or more hot spares to cover multiple vdevs?

New subscriber. Need a homelab tour.

this not for home, this suited for small business. from my experience this kind of storage server is hot and very noisy almost like enterprise server class. you should has dedicated room with good air circulation and insulation.

😏👍 Very Nice, now fill it up 😊

Nice video! Could you maybe link the ebay reseller?

"But you can't use RAID for backup" is what all the Internet ninnies say.

二手还是很划算的

power consumption = terrible.

The constant swearing when I am trying to teach my kid about computers made me very angry having to tell her to go do something else. She doesn't need to hear this kind of language when being taught about computers and servers. very disappointed you kept throwing out the F bombs. Not acceptable by me. Not impressed at all. no need to be swearing.