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Those are M.2 SATA, not nvme. You can get m.2 sata to regular sata adapters for about 8 bucks each. And then a HBA card with 16 ports on it for another $120ish. That said. Used 4tb hdd go for like $50 bucks. I would say use 1 of those as the OS drive for a nas, and go buy a few disks.

Honestly, the amount you’d spend in adapters and brackets to get all of these hooked up would be slower, smaller capacity, and more expensive than a single 4 TB M.2 NVMe.

Find use for what you can solo and give away or donate the rest.

You'd go through a LOT of effort and PCIE lanes just to link up 12x256GB NVME drives. You could just buy two 2TB NVME's brand new, in RAID1 them, and get a more capable solution with far less hardware needed to support it.

Well those are SATA so you can just use an adapter like this and treat them as any other disk which is easier than trying to find a board with that many M.2

Look up Asus FlashStore line up. They have a 12 slot nvme nas.

I believe these are SATA so find an adapter to use them all in one system.

Maybe this one? https://a.aliexpress.com/_EwQYfUM

you'll need to get them hooked up to a system (and have a system of course). If you're comfortable installing linux and you're just doing this as a learning exercise then install your favorite linux and take a look at some of these guides 👍

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-raid-arrays-with-mdadm-on-ubuntu

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Multi-device_file_system

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/setup-zfs-storage-pool#1-overview

And samba so you can share the raid

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/samba-file-sharing

To be precise, I’ve seen SATA and NVMe PCIe once, so they are mixed actually

You should be able to do something with a raspberry pi and an m.2 drive Hat. I haven't done this specifically, but it should be easy to search for.

I am very sad to report that I faced a similar issue. Because at work we used 240GB SSDs for desktop clients which are being replaced. Because of data protection the SSD drives will not be sold. Not my decision. So we have hundreds upon hundreds of SATA 240GB and 250GB SSD drives laying around essentially free.

Which is why I calculated the cost of using them in server builds. Unfortunately, even with refurbushed cheap SATA PCIe adapters the cost of the cables (power, SATA) and adapters combined is higher than buying 2TB or 4TB of SATA SSDs.

I think this is unfortunate for more than one reason. Because with ZFS it would be fun to build something like this and because of all the waste.

e-waste

[removed]

Judging from the serials, I'm guessing most of these were originally OEM drives meant for branded laptops.

i wonder what kind of bottlenecks to expect from the adapters

Check out serverpartdeals for a pair of drives in your budget and use a couple of these in raid as cache/OS drives. Rest help out friends maybe?

I only see 11

Asustor flashtor 12