I can pick up a dell 2950 which has sas drives in it.  All my data drives are 3.5” sata drives.   Trying to figure out how to make this work?  Maybe get an external cage to hold my drives.  Or move the board to a larger case that holds 3.5” drives?   New to true server world 

SAS controllers can normally handle SATA disks.

It's the same electrical interface (almost - a bit depending on standard version) and the controller can normally talk SCSI or ATA depending on disk.

Yes.  But I can’t physically fit the larger drives into the server since it is designed for 2.5” drives.     Trying to find a way to retrofit or just leave the drives outside the server to work 

 

I use an hba, hp sas expander, and an md1000, though any jbod enclosure and the right connections should work if the card works with unRaid.

That md1000 looks interesting.  Wonder if it uses a ton of power.  How do you connect them together.  Through the sas expander?   Sorry. New to rack mount server world.   

On 5/16/2018 at 7:22 AM, bphillips330 said:

That md1000 looks interesting.  Wonder if it uses a ton of power.  How do you connect them together.  Through the sas expander?   Sorry. New to rack mount server world.   

 

It's a bit slow, I can only get it to do 500MB/s. Some others on the internet using a different OS report up to 700MB/s but no faster even though it has about 2,000MB/s theoretical max. It connects via a x4 cable out the hp sas expander card. just plug and play. I think it idles around 50-75 watts, but has LOUD fans. I keep my rack in the garage/basement so I don't hear it. 

 

I'm looking to replace it within the next year with something faster and maybe bigger. right now my 4tb parity check take 12 hours. I'd like to cut that down a bit with more bandwidth to a better jbod box. But it doesn't limit my read/write speeds to the array, so that makes it more tolerable.

 

If you can get it cheap and don't mind the noise and bandwidth cap, then it's not a bad starting point. Mine was free so I try not to complain too much! I tried to engineer my own jbod box by connecting the expander into another expander, which then used breakout cables to drives. But I could never get the HBA to see the drives. I read somewhere on the internet that it "should" work but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

special note: if you're going to run sata drives, you'll need to also get some "interposers" to go in-between the drive and the backplane. they aren't too expensive but they can add up. It also has the ability to "split" the enclosure and put 8 drives on one side and 7 on the other with independent access. I've done this to run a primary unRaid array on one side of the box while the other is the backup array managed by another lower powered server.

On 5/8/2018 at 9:36 AM, bphillips330 said:

move the board to a larger case that holds 3.5” drives?

This would be the best solution.