I'm in the process of trying to figure out the best path forward with my home server. It's about 8-9 years old now, running WHS 2011 on an i3-4150 with 8gb memory. It's mainly used as a file server and streams media to a media player. The motherboard has 6 Sata connectors, the C:/OS drive is a Samsung 840 SSD, the other 5 HDDs are a mix of HGST drives ranging from 4TB-16TB. The system has been performing fine, usually I get around 120MB/s with any transfers and I'm happy enough with that performance for now. My main issue is I'm out of space and can't back up my movie collection (about 20TB). So given the age of the system I'm debating my options and have come up with the following
1) Replace one of the 4TB drives with another 16TB drive. This would solve the problem for about $350 dollars
2) Add a PCIe SATA expansion card to connect the x4 old 4TB drives I have sitting around. Though I'd need an external enclosure since my case can't hold any more drives. It seems like from reading reviews that these cards can be finicky and I don't really wanna deal with instability. So I'm not sure on this option.
3) Upgrade motherboard/cpu to a mobo that has at least 8x sata ports (ideally would aim for x10-x12 ports). I'm not finding a lot of decent options here though unless I'm missing boards it seems like most are $500ish dollars, plus then a cpu (haven't even looked for another cpu that supports ECC yet).
4) An option I'm not thinking of?
Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks
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myrkr
I'm in the process of trying to figure out the best path forward with my home server. It's about 8-9 years old now, running WHS 2011 on an i3-4150 with 8gb memory. It's mainly used as a file server and streams media to a media player. The motherboard has 6 Sata connectors, the C:/OS drive is a Samsung 840 SSD, the other 5 HDDs are a mix of HGST drives ranging from 4TB-16TB. The system has been performing fine, usually I get around 120MB/s with any transfers and I'm happy enough with that performance for now. My main issue is I'm out of space and can't back up my movie collection (about 20TB). So given the age of the system I'm debating my options and have come up with the following
1) Replace one of the 4TB drives with another 16TB drive. This would solve the problem for about $350 dollars
2) Add a PCIe SATA expansion card to connect the x4 old 4TB drives I have sitting around. Though I'd need an external enclosure since my case can't hold any more drives. It seems like from reading reviews that these cards can be finicky and I don't really wanna deal with instability. So I'm not sure on this option.
3) Upgrade motherboard/cpu to a mobo that has at least 8x sata ports (ideally would aim for x10-x12 ports). I'm not finding a lot of decent options here though unless I'm missing boards it seems like most are $500ish dollars, plus then a cpu (haven't even looked for another cpu that supports ECC yet).
4) An option I'm not thinking of?
Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks
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