Hey Everyone,

 

I'm planning to upgrade my storage with a cheap SAS Drive Enclosure (the HP QR491A). Working with SAS expansion enclosures is new to me and I want to make sure that I understand everything right before purchasing it:

 

- This enclosure should work fine with normal 3.5" SATA HDDs (like Seagate Ironwolfs)

- I can connect the enclosure to my existing HBA with an 2x SFF-8087 -> 2 x SFF-8088 adapter (My HBA is a LSI 9211-8I and uses a LSI SAS2008-> this one exactly https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B01M2AC40Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 )

- The disks in the enclosure will show up as individual disks and not as a combined RAID disk

 

I already have about 14 Disks in use (not counting parity or cache drives), but my Fantec case is really poor quality and I have lots of problems with backplane connectivity, so I plan to put nearly all my existing disks in the HP QR491A.

 

Thanks in advance and joyfull holidays everyone

Should work. 

Thanks for the quick reply!

I will try it and post the result.

Put your SSDs on the Motherboard SATA ports.  Someone said the LSI HBA cards cannot do TRIM on SSDs.

Thanks for the advice, I plan to keep the SSDs and the parity drives in the main case and connect them directly to the motherboard. Maybe also some data drives, because in the long run I will max out the number of data drives Unraid supports.

Did you end up going for the M6720? How is it in regards to unRAID and (presumably) non-HP drives?

Oh right, sorry for not updating.

No, i didn't find any drive caddys for a reasonable price. I ended up buying a used Supermicro 847E26-RJBOD1 for around 900€.

It's like new and works great with Unraid, my HBA and all my drives (Seagate, WD and Toshiba).