>>39157>Is there any reason to ever go any more than thisWell... There's the NetApp DS4486, which is the exact same form factor, but double the amount of drives (each drive sled holds two drives at once), but you lose multipath redundancy. Ordinarily, like in the DS4246 or DS2246, each SAS drive has two access paths so that if one of the drive controllers dies, you don't lose any uptime, but with the DS4486, each drive gets only one access path.
If you still want more drives than that... There's the NetApp DE6600, which can hold 60 drives. Unlike the DS4246 or DS4486, it does not use drive caddies (which you need to screw each drive into), instead it uses integrated slide-out trays that you put the drives into and then back them onto the connector.
All of them support both SAS and SATA drives. Both the DS4246 and DS4486 are dual voltage 120~240V, but the DE6600 is 240V only. With the DE6600, you would also likely need to replace the controller cards with "NetApp 100120-113" cards. Another quirk of them is that you need a minimum of 20 drives, whereas the DS4246 and DS4486 will accept any number of drives. The DE6600 are much louder than either. If you're curious about them, Digital Spaceport has a fairly in-depth video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ww6Nvn0aTUAlso, he has a newer, better video on the DS4246:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkPNOb-arXc>in terms of storage safety/lifespanThe disk shelf will outlast your drives. Safety mainly comes down to how fault tolerant your RAID layout is, and making periodic backups (RAID is not a backup!). Having a UPS to protect your drives from blackouts is also important. There's two main types of UPS depending on how "clean" the AC waveform is coming into your house: line-interactive, and online double-conversion. line-interactive UPS's modulate the AC waveform to deal with voltage fluctuations, but they cannot fix voltage ripple, so any bad AC is going to pass through to your load, assuming you're not running on battery. Online double-conversion UPS's can deal with voltage ripple, but they do so at the expense of efficiency because all incoming electricity is rectified to DC, filtered, and then converted back to a clean pure sine AC waveform. Line-interactive UPS's also tend to be a little bit slower to switchover to battery (but not in any meaningful sense.), whereas online double-conversion UPS's switchover instantly.
Oh, and in terms of backups... If you have the space... I've been oggling a
Quantum Scalar i500 that's fully populated with LTO5 FC tape drives. It should have a total capacity of around 225 tapes, for a total capacity somewhere in the range of 337TB to 675TB. The low end number is for uncompressed media, like video, whereas the high end is for compressible media like text (think OS backups and the like). You would need a fibre channel switch to use it, though, and a fibre channel card, ideally in the same server as the HBA for the disk shelf, so you can directly access the storage and write to tape as fast as possible to prevent wear (tape runs at a single, constant speed, so slow-downs mean the tape has to rewind, which slightly stretches it over time, which isn't good for the tape. In a worst-case scenario the tape can snap and get tangled in the tape drive).
>is this about the best I can buy for my buckYeah, pretty much. The DS4243/DS4246 tends to run around $300 plus shipping. DS4486 tends to run around double that at around $600. The DE6600 is typically found in the $600-$1000 range.
The DS4246 is pretty much plug and play, as is the DS4486. Either are generally going to be the best you can buy for the price, in terms of expansion storage. The DE6600 is a lot more finicky.
As far as pairing a server with it goes, I would probably recommend something like a Dell R740 if you want to put a dual slot GPU inside (Note: you're definitely not putting a 4090 or anything like that inside.). Or, you could go with an R740XD if you want to start out with 12x to 18x drives and then see if you need a disk shelf like mentioned above. If you more or less just want something to connect up to the disk shelf, you could get an R640, which is 1U instead of 2U like the R740's. Those can fit a few single slot PCIe cards you want to add networking cards, an HBA, or a single slot GPU for things like video transcoding for Jellyfin or Plex.
If you want, you could go a generation older with an R730 or even R720 (or R630 or R620). Parts are plentiful and cheap. I personally would just recommend an Rx40 server because they support Xeon Scalable gen 1 and 2, which supports PCIe 4.0, NVMe, and Intel Optane Persistent Memory which allows cheap, high capacity RAM expansion; e.g. single stick 512GB Optane Pmem100 is ~$200. single stick 256GB DDR4 is ~$750. Pmem needs to be paired with at least one DRAM stick per channel, though, so you can't just use all Pmem. Most Intel Xeon CPUs top out around 1TB of RAM, so if you want to go beyond that, you would need to look at the -M (2TB per CPU) or -L (4.5TB per CPU) SKU Xeon CPUs.