Sometimes I grab an old, janky piece of enterprise gear thinking it’ll be a fun little project… and then it fights me the whole way. In this video, I picked up an old EMC/Dell AX4-era 12-bay JBOD enclosure for basically nothing and tried to see if it could make sense as cheap storage without absolutely shredding your power bill. I walk through what it is, how the SAS “in/out” controllers work (I’m still kind of a SAS noob, so yes—correct me nicely), and the big gotchas: it’s SAS-1, it’s heavy, it’s loud, and the idle power draw is honestly the real kicker. I tested it with TrueNAS using a Dell Optiplex plus an external HBA and 10Gb networking, then loaded it up with 18TB SAS drives and a couple SAS SSDs. With enough spinning disks, the throughput is actually decent—good enough to hit around 10Gb speeds in real-world transfers—but the SSDs get bottlenecked hard by the SAS-1 link. The more interesting part is the “cheap storage server” twist: I turned it into a backup box that only powers on when it needs to run, using MergerFS + SnapRAID, a simple backup script, and a Home Assistant automation to power everything up, run backups/scrubs, then shut it all back down. It’s weird, but it works—and it keeps this kind of old hardware from running 24/7 for no reason.