Upgrade old machine or start over?

[dropzone7]

23 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

I would be looking more at something like this:

 

    https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-H310-6Gbps-SAS-HBA-w-LSI-9211-8i-P20-IT-Mode-for-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/162834659601?epid=0&hash=item25e9b3b911:g:UxcAAOSwWrxcPvQv:sc:USPSPriorityMailSmallFlatRateBox!43213!US!-1

 

This vendor has been around for several years and has an excellent reputation.  (While these cards are used, they are virtually guaranteed to built by LSI since DELL had them made as an OEM product for use in their servers.  These cards usually come when server farms are decommissioned.)

Okay, more dumb questions. The card you link to above says it has (2) connectors, each with (4) lanes for a total of (8) lanes per card. I'm assuming that means each one of these cards would support (8) drives. The motherboards I have been looking at seem to have 5 or 6 SATA ports on them so if I use all the ones on the motherboard and then (2) of these cards I am set for 20+ drives right? 

 

[Frank1940]

15 minutes ago, dropzone7 said:

The card you link to above says it has (2) connectors, each with (4) lanes for a total of (8) lanes per card. I'm assuming that means each one of these cards would support (8) drives.

Yes. 

 

15 minutes ago, dropzone7 said:

The motherboards I have been looking at seem to have 5 or 6 SATA ports on them so if I use all the ones on the motherboard and then (2) of these cards I am set for 20+ drives right?

 

Basically, yes.  You would need to  use four of those ports to have all twenty bays available.  (With that many drives, I would be using dual parity and eighteen data drives would provide capacity north of 144 TB!)*  Now about the MB SATA ports.  If you have M.2 SSD slots on them and you decide to use any of them, the electronics for these slots are sometimes ''shared" with SATA ports.  In other words, if you use the M.2 slot, you lose the SATA port.  This is not necessary a negative because without the M.2 slot, you would  have to use a SATA port for an SSD.   (You usually have to go to the manufacturer's website and download the spec sheets and/or manual to figure out these fine print details!)

 

In case you are wondering, most folks, today, will opt for an SSD to use for a cache drive.  There are many advantages to doing so and I know of no reason why anyone  would use a spinner today for a cache drive. 

 

* If you think you would ever need that much capacity in the next five years, you should not be consider purchasing a parity drive of less than 8TB as the starting point when building out the server.