How do you add lots of hard drive sata ports to your setup?

[John Danger]

How do you add lots of hard drive sata ports to your setup?

 

Is there like a special motherboard that you use that comes with 30 SATA slots or is there some kind of device that adds a ton of SATA connectors?

 

Thanks.

[DCWerick]

look for HBA (host bus adapter) thats what i use for mine.

Silverstone 6port (sample)

You don't need those raid type ones (unraid don't need those)

[John Danger]

24 minutes ago, DCWerick said:

look for HBA (host bus adapter) thats what i use for mine.

Silverstone 6port (sample)

You don't need those raid type ones (unraid don't need those)

 

Ok, so this gives you 6 extra SATA connection plus the 4  SATA  or so the motherboard has built-in. It will also take up your only PCI-E slot so you can't have a graphics card along with this. 

 

So this setup would only provide 10 drives. What if you want the full capacity of 30 drives? How can that be achieved?

 

Thanks.

[itimpi]

Sounds as if you are trying to use a server for Unraid with very little expansion capabilities?  
 

In terms of a graphics card then Unraid itself does not require one (although some motherboards might) as it is administered using a browser and this can be done over the network.

 

There are HBA boards that support more than 6 ports.    I have a LSI one with 16 ports.   I believe there are others with even more.  You can also have multiple such HBA boards if you have the free motherboard slots in your server.

[Kilrah]

19 minutes ago, John Danger said:

It will also take up your only PCI-E slot

You use motherboards with more slots, and HBAs with more slots.

[John Danger]

11 hours ago, Kilrah said:

You use motherboards with more slots, and HBAs with more slots.

 

Are you using SAS cards or SATA expansion cards? What case are you using that can fit 20-30 Hard drives? Do you have like some external hard drive cage connected to the Unraid server?

 

Thanks.

[Kilrah]

People who need that many drives tend to get used, rackmounted server gear, you'll find decommissioned Xeon/EPYC systems with tons of PCIe slots, SAS HBAs with lots of ports/bandwidth, and maybe get a separate disk shelf as well for expansion.

Downsides are size, power consumption and noise...

 

Tend to recommend going with few large drives these days, large numbers of drives are cumbersome.

 

Edited November 27, 2022 by Kilrah

[shpitz461]

Check this out: 

 

The secret is using SAS Expanders.

Check out his channel, has tons of server-related videos with great explanations.

[sannitig]

On 1/25/2023 at 8:43 PM, shpitz461 said:

Check this out: 

 

The secret is using SAS Expanders.

Check out his channel, has tons of server-related videos with great explanations.

About to watch the video but want to ask 'why use SAS expander if you are using SATA drives?' What is the purpose of this and not just use a SATA expander? If the SATA drive has a read/write of 120MB/s, what does using a SAS HBA vs a SATA HBA on SATA drives do?

 

 

[Kilrah]

SATA expanders are often unreliable. SAS ones are enterprise-grade stuff that works.

[shpitz461]

Another option would be to get a DAS, aka disk shelf, suck as the NetApp DS4243/6 or DS4486, Dell MD12xx or MD14xx, etc...

There's also a 60-drive shelf available (DE6060) but it is way too expensive, and very loud. Note that some units accept SATA in the SAS enclosures and some don't.

[electron286]

SAS is available in faster speeds too.

 

SAS allows a higher transfer speed (SAS-1, SAS-2, SAS-3, and SAS-4 supports data bandwidth of 3, 6, 12, and 24 Gbits/sec, respectively)

 

SATAIII is limited to 6Gbits/sec.  it is unlikely we sill see a faster SATA standard.

 

When picking SAS HBAs and Expanders, it is possible to find ones that support dual linking!  Dual link uses two SAS links for increased total bandwidth, PLUS can provide for interconnectivity redundancy.  So you can choose hardware that will provide 24Gbits,/sec. using 2 12 Gbit links, that if one link is lost, all downstream drives will still be available at a reduced total bandwidth of 12Gbits.  The same can be done with the previous SAS-2 cards, at half those data transfer speeds.

 

If carefully choosing SAS/SATA capable boards, and cables/chassis, a very nice SATA or mixed SAS/SATA drive array can be setup with high data throughput.