August 2, 20178 yr Started with a good deal on CraigsList, a Dell desktop with an i7-3770, 16GB memory for $260 (it was a full workstation, but that's all I needed from it.)which would be upgrading my C2Q9650 with 4GB (ddr2 is kind of expensive now, didn't see it worth it if I was just going to upgrade at some point to a new CPU/MB. So after reading all the threads on HBA cards, it was down to the LSI 9207-8i or 9201-8i, but then I saw a deal that was to good to pass up and that was the 9201-16i (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HCP7VX4/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) for $34, I'd deal with routing cables from outside for that price. Grabbed these cables: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013G4EX9K/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 it does not say forward cable, but it does say "This cable connects a to SFF-8088 Mini SAS Controller directly to 4 SATA drives.", so I'm assuming its the right cable. Bought a second hotswap cage, the same one I already have, will have room for one more, but that will be for a later date: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132037R The mobo has 4xsata, so the first cage is full with 4tb parity, and a 1tb, 2tb and 4tb in the array. Have an ssd ready to add when I get the HBA for cache a couple more 2tb drives and thinking I should buy another 4tb for a secondary parity. Have an 8tb usb drive that will be backing up business/family no replaceable files. Not going to worry about backing up TV/Movie files, we mostly only watch what's new anyways, probably never to be watched again. Was previously running Server 2012 R2 with Stablebit Drivepool and plex/sabnzbd/sonarr installed on it. Didn't really like the experience of running VMs in Hyper-V or VMWare Workstation, so when I saw Linus Tech Tips doing a dual gaming rig with unRaid VMs it seemed like a prefect match and so far it is. I have yet to install Server 2016 as a VM, but plan to as I'm sure now that it has been out long enough we will start to put 2016 into testing and then production at work, currently all servers we manage run Server 2012 Standard. So need to be able to create a VM that runs close to how it would on bare metal to test it out and at the same time not cause downtime on my NAS/Plex/Download server (aka unRaid server).
August 3, 20178 yr Those are the right cables I believe. The -16e is a heck of a deal! Just make sure you have a PCIe 2.0 x8 splot for it.
August 5, 20178 yr Author Got the card and the cables, working great. To bad NewEgg sent me a bad hotswap drive cage. Now to wait on the replacement. Like many on here I was using DrivePool before to make one large drive on Server 2012 R2. Great idea, but implementation needs work, specially the folders that you tell it to duplicate, each will have a hidden directory and it is just a mess when you just want to transfer it to somewhere else. Loving the dockers, SABNZBd, Sonarr and Plex all work great. Was always having to fix Plex on Windows, not so with the dockers. Can't wait to be able to close the thing up and not have to touch the insides for a long time.
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