at a minimum the facility will need some power conditioning and/or insurance. you don't want a brief power surge to eat all of your capital, and lockup fees, in one go.
> For a 32 HDD system, you expect about 5 drives to fail per year. This takes time to repair and you will need on-site staff (just not 24/7). To account for these costs, we will budget $50 per year per rig.
will you not also lose 6TB (times utilization) of your lockup every time a drive dies?
> 8x 4 way SATA data splitters
you've linked to SAS breakout cables. they don't plug into SATA ports, they plug into SFF-8087 SAS ports.
they cannot plug into the motherboard you've listed. nor have I ever seen one listed for retail sale that has 8 SFF-8087 ports.
the cheapest way to get 8 SFF-8087 ports is with some SAS expander card, and a SAS HBA. even scraping off eBay that's another $50 per host, and two more components to fail.
there are also actual SATA expanders out there, but they last about 3 months before catastrophic failure in my experience.
Isn't a potential problem with "SATA splitters" also that all disks will share the same channel an therefore end up with worse performance? (Though I guess it won't make a difference for mechanical drives)
any of the expander (SATA, or SAS) things, yes, will be sharing bandwidth. but as you mention, it won't be a limiting factor for mechanical drives. and considering the latency involved in this sort of retrieval, probably isn't a problem regardless.
FWIW the break out cable they've listed is splitting up a connector that has 4 electrical channels onto 4 physically separate cables, so there's no problem with it. they just don't have anywhere to plug it in.
In addition to the SATA port multipliers, they'd need actual SATA PCIe cards. Basically nobody makes a motherboard with onboard SATA that supports port multipliers.
> For a 32 HDD system, you expect about 5 drives to fail per year. This takes time to repair and you will need on-site staff (just not 24/7). To account for these costs, we will budget $50 per year per rig.
will you not also lose 6TB (times utilization) of your lockup every time a drive dies?
> 8x 4 way SATA data splitters
you've linked to SAS breakout cables. they don't plug into SATA ports, they plug into SFF-8087 SAS ports.
they cannot plug into the motherboard you've listed. nor have I ever seen one listed for retail sale that has 8 SFF-8087 ports.
the cheapest way to get 8 SFF-8087 ports is with some SAS expander card, and a SAS HBA. even scraping off eBay that's another $50 per host, and two more components to fail.
there are also actual SATA expanders out there, but they last about 3 months before catastrophic failure in my experience.