Expansion on the cheap...?

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Hanry

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Hello!

Until last week I had a ReadyNAS Duo. Now I have a Gen10 HP Microserver running FreeNAS and I am *happy*. FreeNAS rocks, and so do a lot of people here on the forum who give good advice - thank you!

My use case is fairly low:
MediaServer (but watching max. 1 movie or four TV shows a week)
Business Nearline Storage (not on there yet, will grow to 4TB, most of that are very large files, few of which I need to use more than once, but need to keep just in case)
3 x TimeMachine backups
Storing all of the crud I used to keep on DVD-Rs, with a 6month review-or-loose policy ;-)
...that's it.

I also happen to have a whole stack of 500GB and 1TB LFF SATA disks which I would hate to throw away. After reading this thread I had this mad idea:
Reconfigure my FreeNAS from 2 x mirrored, two sets striped to all ZFS glory for max space,
Add a LowProfile SAS controller
Buy something like this an HP MSA60 , which can be found refurbished for £210 plus p&p
Use all of the 500GB and 1TB drives I have to make a solid block of resilient storage
...and then run a daily backup from the Gen10 to the motley array. (I am keen to automate that, but perfectly happy for now to power up the arrray, run snapshot and power down. After all, if I am not at home, no changes to data, no need for snapshots?)

1) Is this workable or am I barking mad?
2) As a self-employed person I would like to save every penny - is the HP the cheapest option? It is the cheapest I can find, but someone may know better deals?
as it is only expected to run intermittently, it does not have to be the quietest, only the cheapest ;-)
...but of course, the quieter, the better!

Thank you very much!
Hanry


P.S. And then I did some number-crunching with that marvellous tool someone here wrote and I realise that it would be not much use as a backup. So, new thunk: I run my 4 x 4TB disks as a Z2 array instead, and clobber all my old disks together as an archive. So anything that I need to keep for compliance reasons or because I am a hoarder, that goes onto the expansion set.
Even less spinning up of the chassis then, as I will probably only need to move stuff into it once a week, and retrieve stuff once a month.
That might be more reasonable?
Now noise really is (almost) no barrier. Only cash is ;-)
 
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diskdiddler

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