Looking for input on SAS drives in HTPC

[jme5343]

I came by about 10 2.5" SAS 900gb drives as well as one 3.5" 3tb drive (all 6gb/s) from a family member over thxgiving dinner.

For the overall capacity, I'm considering adding them to my htpc, as it would give me another 3-4 years worth of growth, as I've got abou 8tb of data on sata drives now. Obviously if they weren't free, I'd stick with SATA, but it's hard to turn down 12TB of free storage.

It appears that I would need, at the least, an SAS controller, but after a couple hours of google searches, I don't feel a lot more wise than I did before.

Could someone explain to me if there are any huge gaps in my plan, and if only small gaps, what the best solution may be: external storage, which SAS card would be affordable and serve the purpose, etc?

 

[Micrornd]

Since you got them for free, you can afford to spend a few bucks and then, you can have your cake and eat it too :biggrin:

h**p://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-SAS-to-SATA-Workstation-Hard-Drive-Converter-Adapter-Connector-HDD-398291-001-/220868696476

Please note this is not a recommendation of where to buy (although I have 20 I purchased here), but rather the best example of what you need.

They allow SAS to work with SATA cables and controllers.

 

[jme5343]

Awesome, thank you Micrornd,

So, with those, do I still need a controller card? I was under the impression SATA would work with an SAS controller, but SAS would not work with a SATA capable board.

 

[Micrornd]

YMMV, but I've had no trouble using them with Intel or LSI based onboard SATA controllers.

 

[Emulex]

LSI dumb raid (raid-1/1e/10) are like $30-50

I paid $66 for my megaraid LSI 9260-8i's without battery (used with SSD 4-6 drive raid-10).

Good place for any server related stuff: www.servethehome.com forums. you can find stupendous deals there. Maybe pickup a pair of infiniband nic's and a cable, and wire up 40gbit QDR to your two pc's for $150 (total).

or just get a MSA70 off ebay for $99 and a cheapie external card. ZFS on nexenta CE is a great way to do software raid.

If you want 3.5" Check out MSA60 $99 ebay.

Or check out MDS 600 HP for 70 3.5" external cage The are about $600 plus freight since they weight couple hundred pounds!

Those options work will with the LSI megaraid (9260-8i or oem). I have a few of those with cachecade 2.0 which allows up to 256gb of read/write caching to the drives. Whilst the base card is cheap, the cachecade option can add $150 to the cost. But man it is sick to have all your writes/reads offloaded to a pair of SSD. Think of it like 256GB FLASH BACK WRITE CACHE. That is Gigabytes not megabytes.

Nexenta needs a dumb controller IT MODE with no battery. Everything else requires a battery-back/flash back write cache otherwise performance will suck balls.

MSA70 for those 10 drives - leave you with 15 more slots to add some more drives/ssd.

ebay search HP MSA70 or HP MSA 60 or HP MDS 600