I bought too many HDDs! Recommendations needed on what to do.

[KRunyon]

I compulsively just bought 60 SAS drives on ebay (CMR/PMR) that intend on building two more Unraid servers with. I'll likely be utilizing SAS expanders, but I have never worked with one before. Also the drives are 520 blocks, should I hold off for ZFS support in Unraid and make the most of them, or is there a more optimal way of integrating them entirely?

 

Any recommendations on compatible expanders for my existing hardware? What shortcomings can I expect using an expander rather than dedicated controller? I'll be using a multi-terabyte SSD as a cache drive, so overall throughput isn't really an issue.

 

Currently available hardware:

3x LSI SAS 9207-8i Controllers 6Gbps

1x LSI SAS 9440-8i Controller (12Gbps)

1x LSI MegaRAID SAS 9361-4i (12Gbps)

 

Also, any affordable cases out there for 30 drives? Planning on throwing together a custom rosewill 4u at this point.

[JorgeB]

15 minutes ago, KRunyon said:

Also the drives are 520 blocks,

You'll need to reformat to 512 Bytes, Unraid only supports 512 or 4K, same as FreeNAS btw.

 

15 minutes ago, KRunyon said:

Any recommendations on compatible expanders for my existing hardware?

Recommend LSI based expanders, like the Intel RES2SV240 or RES2CV360, or if buying a chassis with expander any Supermicro with a SAS2/SAS3 expander.

[FreeMan]

Is there really such a thing as "too many hard drives"?

[KRunyon]

3 minutes ago, FreeMan said:

Is there really such a thing as "too many hard drives"?

Feels like it, lol. Going to have to buy two servers.

 

Decided to go with this (I have not bought it yet)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/133275531081

(I have SAS3 HBA cards I can swap in, that way I can utilize the SAS3 SSDs I have for cache drives).

 

Luckily I have an amazing array of domains I can spin up and hopefully break even with.