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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

In this case "on a budget" means $4,329. That's reasonable if it speeds up billable work, but sadly the cost puts it a bit out of reach for my home office.

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"I edit videos non-stop nowadays."

For a video editor, at least one that's been around long enough to remember DAS and SAN solutions, $4300k for 40TB of edit capable storage is cheap.

Perspective is everything.

The 60TB Isilon I ordered for video storage was 115k... (5 years ago granted)

The first Isilon system I worked on was in 2008. It was less than 60TB and more expensive than 115k and used Gigabit connections. The first fibre connected SAN I used was in 2006, and was closer to 300k by the time all of the HBA cards, SFPs, 1000 per seat licenses, and the drive arrays were added together for around 48TB.

And peeps wonder why we think $4500 is cheap!

the budget option is < 800$ ?

Still quite a lot. All you really need is an old i7 and a 10GbE Mellanox Connect-X2 or Connect-X3 card from eBay for $10-20.

I agree with your message but it's hard to find an i7 that supports ECC RAM and the Mellanox Connect-X 2 has lost support in modern distros.

Best bet is to pick up an old HP Z620 of find someone who is upgrading their old Xeon homelab. Generally its a choice of cheap, quiet, energy efficient and you can only pick two of these options.

In my case, one of the main goals was quiet, which ruled out some decent used 1U servers I found at the recycler :(

Someday I'll have a proper closet but right now my rack is under the kitchen and my wife complains when the servers get above about 60 dB.

Yeah I live in a studio and quiet is hard. I am also fussy and don’t want anything that looks out of place.

I actually built my desktop as a near silent PC with the goal of it becoming my NAS when I upgrade but I didn’t understand the implications of running ZFS without ECC at the time.

FWIW I've run ZFS on my NAS since 2009, and I have had no detectable file corruption due to not using ECC. There might be something somewhere but it's not worse than other filesystems or anything in that regard.

So while I'd certainly sleep sounder with ECC on it, it's not a complete horror show like someone likes to portray it as.

Yes I guess it comes down to the likely hood of the RAM going bad without the user realising it.

I have had one stick give me issues over the last 10 years but that is out of probably 20 sticks.

Would your home office benefit from 40TB of SSD space?

Or is it one of those things that would be cool to have but not really necessary?

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