July 23, 20205 yr 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.
July 23, 20205 yr 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.
July 24, 20205 yr Author 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.
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