Wanting to add more disks (JBOD) Advice needed

[TeCH-Guruz]

Aight guys so I have built up a pretty basic unraid setup that consists of the following. 

MSI Z270M 

G4600 (looking and changing to a 7700T)

32GB 2x16GB DDR4 

500GB Samsung 970 NVMe (cache drive)

Corsair RM450

2x12TB IronWolf (need to add another at a later date for parity)

1x4TB IronWolf

 

The biggest thing for me was the case I had to have it all fit in my HP Omen X. So now all that's working as it should, I am looking at my options for adding some extra drives. Then I remembered about the hp omen accelerator which matches my case perfectly. Now this is meant for an external GPU but I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work but I am a relative rookie when it comes to this kind of thing so any advice here would be appreciated. So I'm wanting to know which HBA cards are recommended for this kind of setup and can you see any potential flaws. I would be looking at running 2 of these hp omen accelerators since the whole reason for building the system, in this case, was to showcase it along with the rest of my media setup.

[TeCH-Guruz]

So after doing some more reading, this seems like the solution I need 

H200 in the main server (is there any difference between the h200 and h200e?) or LSI SAS9200-8e basically an HBA with 2x external 8088 ports

Then an 8088 to 8087 like this in the HDD storage box

 

and the relevant cables to connect everything does this look about right? I figured since the maximum amount of drives that will fit in the storage box is 4 I won't need a SAS expander? Also, I don't plan on adding more than 2 of these boxes as that gives me a total of 12 drives and by the time I fill the 12x 12tb drive, it will be time to upgrade to a better solution. 

 

Any problems with this setup or should I go ahead and start buying up the parts or are there better HBA cards with external ports that I would be better off buying?

 

[JorgeB]

1 minute ago, TeCH-Guruz said:

is there any difference between the h200 and h200e?

H200 - 2 internal ports

H200E - 2 external ports

 

2 minutes ago, TeCH-Guruz said:

I figured since the maximum amount of drives that will fit in the storage box is 4 I won't need a SAS expander?

Correct, but in that case note that you must respect the maximum 1m total size for the cables, from the HBA to the SATA disks.

[TeCH-Guruz]

3 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

H200 - 2 internal ports

H200E - 2 external ports

 

Correct, but in that case note that you must respect the maximum 1m total size for the cables, from the HBA to the SATA disks.

Cheers buddy will have a quick measure but that shouldn't be a problem am I correct in thinking if I want to be able to use a longer cable then a SAS expander would be required in the storage case? Would an HP Expander card be a more suitable fit for the storage case?

Edited February 17, 2019 by TeCH-Guruz

[JorgeB]

1 minute ago, TeCH-Guruz said:

if I want to be able to use a longer cable then a SAS expander would be required in the storage case?

Yes, then you could have a longer cable from the HBA to the expander, plus 1m from the expander to the SATA disks.

[TeCH-Guruz]

3 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

Yes, then you could have a longer cable from the HBA to the expander, plus 1m from the expander to the SATA disks.

Cheers buddy just a couple more questions are the H200E still a decent card for my needs or is there a card that would work better? I don't think the 1meter cable will be a problem since this is how they will be layed out but is there an alternative to the HP expander that doesnt take up so much space since I only need to add 4 drives?

[JorgeB]

It's fine for that many disks, if you were using SSDs or many disks with an expander a PCIe 3.0 or a SAS3 model would be better.