(re-posted from server forum)

I've spent more time than I'd like to think of investigating the best option for a capable home server.

I want to use BTRFS directly on a set of disks (no hardware raid), so I want a controller that it capable of running in JBOD configuration. I want to support at least 6 3.5'' SATA hard disk drives of at least 4TB.

I'd like the capacity for around 32GB of RAM.

I though I had hit on a reasonable solution with the Dell 2950 III before I found that the PERC 6i controller only supports drives up to 2TB in size. (a dell 2950 III without disks or RAM can be found for around £100)

Now I'm starting again looking at slightly newer servers, but the price seems to rise pretty rapidly as I look at newer models.

If anyone has expertise on this and can advise I'd be very grateful. Thanks all

PS - perhaps I'm being greedy with the storage capacity. I liked the idea of installing 4 4TB drives and having two free for expansion. Running RAID 10 or 6 on BTRFS would leave me with 8TB of space to use. (although I'm not sure RAID 6 on BTRFS is a goof idea at this stage). 6 * 2TB hard drives would be more expensive and take up all of the slots in a Dell 2950, but if I ran it under RAID 6 (again this is questionable), it would at least still give 8TB of usable space.

BTRFS is not exactly ready for prime time (I know of a guy who did thread tests on a BTRFS file system, and it didn't hold up well). If you don't want problems, stick to EXT4.

There are people who can find problems with anything. I've used btrfs RAID5 for my photo collection since the support came out. Love it.
But I'm a stickler for backups - whatever the filesystem.
Been using btrfs since it was released - only problems I found were self inflicted during testing. Early on (as in several years ago) it didn't recover from a drive being yanked from a RAID10 array. Haven't re-tested, but I'd be confident that has been rectified.

As for the real question in this thread, can't help - haven't looked at purchasing hardware for a while, and it's a moving target.

I think you need to tell us more about how you need this sever to perform.

Why do you need a high end server? If only for storage of files then you would only need some solution like LVM or BTRFS or ZFS I'd think. The 32G ram is a lot for a home server. Are you running virtual machines on it or extensive web applications or doing transcoding?

Dell T320 is a good machine. about $3-4K well worth it. But this is just a guess as jefro said, we dont know what you'll be using it for.

When using BTRFS for managing disks you don't need a controller that explicitly supports JBOD, or, for that matter, any other RAID level, if you want to count JBOD to the RAID levels. BTRFS will manage that in software. So, basically any midrange desktop mainboard should do the job just fine, most of them have 6 or more SATA ports.

Thanks all, those responses are helpful.

The server's most important role will be as a file server and media server. However that won't be is most demanding role, it will host some containers running builds, some database experiments, various bits and pieces. All things that would like a bit more CPU/ram but nothing critical. I don't immediately need 32gb and 12tb but I was waiting to build in a sensible amount of headroom.

I basically consider that you've answered my question, to the extent it can be given how annoyingly vague I'm being.

I'm now leaning towards a desktop machine which will support (ideally 6) 4tb drives.

Thanks

Have you considered something running an Illumos kernel? OmniOS should be a good fit for a home server. It's a minimal server oriented distro. Hardware support is a bit iffy on really new systems, but ZFS (and several other goodies) are baked right in. If you want a nice web GUI to configure everything with, you can look at Napp-IT.

FreeBSD might be another good option, but I am not sure it can boot from ZFS like Illumos can.

If you want Illumos with a GUI, you could look at OpenIndiana as well. Or heck, why not run Linux and use the ZFS on Linux kernel module (but you'll have to do quite a bit of work to get it to boot from ZFS, if that's something that really interests you).