Curious to JBOD connected vis SAS to max out array at 30 disks

[manofoz]

Hello,

 

I currently have 16 internal HDDs in my array connected via two LSI 9207-8i HBAs in IT mode. One is in PCIE x16 and the other in PCIE x4 and neither bottleneck. My motherboard has another PCIE x4 slot so I could free up the x16 slot to feed more drives. However my case only fits 16 and it would be impossible to max out the array at 30 drives using this case. I've seen some stuff about JBODs using cheap motherboards to power controllers but I haven't seen a tutorials specific to unRAID. I understand a USB enclosure is a bad idea but would something that uses SAS cables be feasible? I don't really know how this would all go but I in my head it would look like this:

 

 

Anyone actually do this? Is the right answer to just get a bigger case if I want more drives? That's not really something I'm interested in doing yet but maybe in a year or two if I move to a place where I could get a server rack I'd go that route. Anyone know of unRAID specific tutorials? What makes my worried about the tutorials I've seen is they don't talk about how unRAID needs these HBA's in IT Mode and how that would all work.

 

Thanks!

[JorgeB]

You can do something like this:

 

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/74460-external-sas-storage-101-query-not-guide/?do=findComment&comment=686248

 

[manofoz]

5 hours ago, JorgeB said:

You can do something like this:

 

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/74460-external-sas-storage-101-query-not-guide/?do=findComment&comment=686248

 

 

Thanks! Building something like that looks like a good way to go. I found this pre-build thing from QNAP that's a bit expensive: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tl-d1600s/specs/package which if I'm reading it correctly comes with an PCIE x8 HBA to plug in the four SAS cables from the JBOD. Would be a plug and play solution, says it works with Ubuntu (Linux) so I'm not 100% sure it would work with unRAID.

 

I'm currently upgrading drives but that's leaving me with a bunch of drives laying around outside of the case.

[JorgeB]

19 hours ago, manofoz said:

so I'm not 100% sure it would work with unRAID.

It should work fine, no expander so it needs a 16 port HBA