Hi gang,

 

I only have 3.2TB left of storage. My full size case with 13 drives has no more drive bays left. I use dual parity. My largest drive is 4TB.

 

i know I can go to 8TB+ drives, but I have to buy 3 drives in order to see any additional storage space. Too much money right now.

 

I have a spare adaptec based controller (with 8 ports) that I can add.

 

• I was thinking of an external drive case like this one. Which has an external mini SAS port for 4 drive bays.
• I would then get an external plug like this one.
• A cable like this one and one like this one.

 

This would allow me for 16TB before I have think about storage again. By then, 8TB drives will be included in your basic Happy Meal. Anyone have a similar setup like this? Anyone have any thoughts?

 

thanks,

 

H.

 

 

 

Edited March 13, 20188 yr by hernandito

Another option to consider, use an atx case, you can even use something you already own, together with an expander and the cables you mention and build your own external case, similar to this:

 

 

Supermicro power board is optional, you can just clip the PSU plug.

Thank you Johnnie. I’m tight on space, thus the small case would help.

 

in your photo; what is that pci card that is bolted to the case? And has all the sas cables?

 

thank you for sharing. This makes me more optimistic!

 

H.

18 minutes ago, hernandito said:

what is that pci card that is bolted to the case?

 

14 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

an expander

 

I’m curious how the expander works without a Motherboard.

 

i see there is power at top of card. Then through a minisas cable coming from unRAID machine, through a plug at back on drive case and that plugs into first slot of expander card. Then all other slots have cables that go to each hard drive. Is this correct? The expander does not need a mobo to do its thing?

 

Cost-wise, it’s a wash between this solution and dedicated enclosure. The main advantage is more drives.

 

Thanks.

 

H.

43 minutes ago, hernandito said:

The expander does not need a mobo to do its thing?

Nope. It can use the motherboard for power if you want, and it's easier to use the slot for mounting vs. trying to rig up electrically isolated mechanically sound mounting elsewhere, but it works fine as long as you feed it power from somewhere.

47 minutes ago, hernandito said:

Cost-wise, it’s a wash between this solution and dedicated enclosure. The main advantage is more drives.

Depends on what you already have and if buying used, the expander cost me around $60, there's also an HP expander on ebay for about $25, though that one needs sto be powered by a board, or at least a PCIe riser.

I started with a similar setup:

LSI 9206-16e(HBA) https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9202-16e
Drive Case: Areca 4036 http://www.thessdreview.com/tag/areca-4036/ 

There's six disks in there + parity.

Of course this only needed 1 cable (I slapped in two to be sure) - https://www.amazon.com/External-Mini-SAS-SFF-8644-SFF-8088-Cable/dp/B00XK4UXXM

 

Thank you all. I’m going to start pricing things and see. I do have an old case.

 

Ken-ji, that Areca case is nuts! too expensive for me.

 

H.