the switch is expensive?

btw, the Avoton CPU are dying, there is some fatal flaw in the chip, big trouble for intel: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/07/intel_atom_failures_go_back_18_months/ https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-long-your-asrock-c2550d4i-or-c2750d4i-lasted.45445/

Rares, have you solved this issue? I’m using an LSI 9201-16i HBA and it’s not seeing the sunrich expander boards. Just one drive per primary port. 4 4-lane SAS ports on the card, and each port is reporting connection directly to one drive, instead of direct connection to a multiplier, which then connects to 5 HDDs.

I know you mentioned that your cost for the power switch with the blue light is actually below $24.95, but, AFAIK, you never mentioned how cheap you get it. Are you able/willing to share that? While you joke that it is the blue light, you also mention that it meets other requirements that many alternative don’t meet, what are those requirements?

Do you foresee a need for a more powerful processor in the near future?

Also, someone mentioned the idea of a pod with a more powerful CPU and “dumb” pods without motherboards. It seems like it would be more efficient, but I assume that if it
was, you would do it. So, I guess I really am asking why it isn’t
better.

You seem to spend a lot on the motherboard and CPU. The ASRock C2550D4I is quad core 2.4GHz (they also have the ~$400 C2750DI that is octo-core) with 12 SATA connections (8 SATA III, 4 SATA II- if five drives on one SATA II is too slow, you could run 40 drives on 8 SATA III and the other five could share the SATA II or direct wire and drop to 44 drives), passive CPU cooling (one less moving part to break) and the CPU is pre-installed. It only has dual GbE, but you could always add a 10GbE PCIe card if needed. Is there something that the current motherboard and CPU offer that I am missing?

Why I am asking… (and info for those building personal NAS solutions)
I recently purchased three 120GB Kingston SSD (two for Mirrored ZFS Intent Log, one for L2ARC) for $39.99 from NewEgg and two 64GB USB 3.0 AES micro flash drives (the ones that barely extend beyond the metal part of the plug) for $17.73 each. Both are for a FreeNAS installation that I recently setup (& love)- I tweaked plans by Brian Moses (Google “DIY NAS” or “Brian Moses DIY NAS”). I even hide my USB drives inside the case using the internal USB connections that are intended for the front USB ports, which my case lacks. Obviously, you would not need all of the features that these specific items offer, but that only means that you could utilize cheaper options.

I also want to THANK YOU for showing that there is NOTHING WRONG WITH SHUCKED HDDs because it gave me the courage to purchase nine (eight for NAS, one spare/USB) 5TB USB 3.0 enclosed drives for $119 or 129 each (retail- Samsung from NewEgg and Amazon- I purchase 2 Seagate for $119 to use as USB 3.0 backups for my NAS, one of which I shucked when Amazon raised their prices 2 days before my big order, which included 4 more Seagate drives for $129). The remaining three 5TB drives that I needed came from NewEgg for $119. This saved me a fortune! Retail, a 4TB WD Red drive is roughly $150 and the 6TB drives that I really wanted were roughly $250 each. So, I got 25% more storage than 4TB drives for LESS MONEY (plus, I have 8 spare USB 3.0 cables, power supplies, & USB 3.0 to SATA cards from the shucking for future projects).

8 USB 3.0 5TB drives for shucking $992 (could have been $952 if I had known about NewEgg’s pricing or ordered sooner on those 4 drives)
Cost per raw TB: $24.80 ($23.80 possible)
Cost per RAID-Z3 (triple parity) TB: $39.68 ($38.08 possible) [25TB]

8 WD RED 4TB $150*8=$1200
Cost per raw TB: $37.5 [32TB]
Cost per RAID-Z3 (triple parity) TB: $60 [20TB]

8 WD RED 6TB $250*8=$2000
Cost per raw TB: $41.67 [48TB]
Cost per RAID-Z3 (triple parity) TB: $66.67 [30TB]

Shucking saved me 40.48% (42.88% if I have paid $119 for all of them) per usable TB compared to the 6TB drives I wanted.

Even though I used Brian’s tutorial, BACKBLAZE GAVE ME THE KNOWLEDGE & COURAGE I NEEDED to make sound decisions and to build my dream NAS (well, almost dream NAS*)

THANK YOU

-Steve

*My budget prevented me from using a slightly modified Pod with 15 (12 data/3 parity) drives to start and room to expand to 45 drives and object storage or RAID-Z3 FreeNAS. Ideally, I would merge the Brian Moses FreeNAS with BackBlaze’s Pod case and capacity (software could be either FreeNAS or object storage).