Hi Everyone,
So I'm used to building desktop pcs and have been for over 20 years, my Unraid setup built in a PC tower enclosure has run out of bays so I'm futureproofing and have bought this 24 bay rack mount enclosure. Logic Case LC-4680-24B-WH 4U Rackmount Storage Chassis https://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/server-cases/rackmount/4u-chassis/logic-case-lc-4680-24b-wh-4u-rackmount-storage-chassis---24x-35-sata-hot-swap---680mm-depth-lc-4680-24b-wh/
Rank mount enclosures and having to connect to back planes is all new to me and frankly I've been researching and reading and have just confused myself even more, I am not sure if I need LSI, HBA, extenders or a combo of those and other stuff and don't even get me started on fully understanding host/target forward or reverse breakout for the SFF-8643 connectors on the backplane!!!
My existing server is SilverStone SST-RV02B-EW which has 5 bays which I extending to 9 bays by using a Syba SI-PEX40064 SATA III 4 Port PCI-e x1 Controller Card taking 4 drives from a StarTech.com 3.5in Trayless Hot Swap SATA Mobile Rack Backplane - 4 Drive Removable Drive Enclosure.
My Motherboard is ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. PRIME B360-PLUS which has 6 SATA slots but as I'm using 2 NVME slots for a cache pool which disables 1 sata port.
The mobo has plenty of PCIE slots and don't have anything apart from the existing controller card connected which won't be going to the new server.
So hopefully that is all the saliant info now this is where i need help, to my monkey brain it seems like the easiest solution is to by a LSI 9305-24i controller and plug all 24 drives into that ignoring the mobo sata ports, but is that creating a bottleneck or is it over kill or just plain stupid ????
Please help me, would I be better with multiple controller cards or one card and an extender or any other options that I know I won't know
Also SAS cabling, am I correct in thinking the SFF-8643 ports on the backplane are the target and so please also advise with you solution if I would need forward or reverse cables is applicable.
I'm excited to move my server to the new enclosure and shouldn't have any problems with anything else but this controller/LSI/HBA/Extender solution is some kind of mental block!!
Thank you in advance to anyone that can help and If i've left something out that is needed to configure the solution let me know