Very new to self hosting and truenas.
Got an old dell with 6x4tb of storage. Turns out they are all SAS drives and turns out hardware raid is the old thing now. Knowing none of this before what can I do with SAS drives connecting to my raid card (in photo) knowing that this is just a home NAS, SAS drives are more expensive and better to just go SATA.
What do you think?
Get a pcie to data, sell all the SAS drives and save up for 6x4tb of Seagate data drives?
What would you do with a dell server with old SAS drives if the end goal was a dependable home NAS for important home files?
I'm new to this so any input helps, thanks!
Why not just use what you have until you can afford to and/or need to upgrade? SAS drives are more expensive because they typically offer higher performance and reliability. Hardware raid may be "old" but it's still very common. The main risk with it is that if your raid card fails, you'll have to replace it with the same model if you don't want to rebuild your server from scratch.
I've been running an old Dell PowerEdge for several years with no issues.
Hardware raid doesn't do much to stop silent corruption. At the very least you want to run something like btrfs on top of it.
While sas is faster, the difference is moot if you have even a modest nvme cache.
I don't know if it's especially that much more reliable, especially I would take new SATA over second hand sas any day.
The hardware raid means everything is locked together, you lose a controller, you have to find a compatible controller. Lose a disk, you have to match pretty closely the previous disk. JBOD would be my strong recommendation for home usage where you need the flexibility in event of failure.
What I'm worried about is that once one drive fails, then I won't want to replace it because I want to go full SATA. But then that would mean my NAS storage would shrink and loose data.
That means that I have to replace all drives to data at the same time, and if I have lots of data on the hardware said SAS drives. How do I transfer all that data to the new drives ?
Any ideas? The best I can think of is to have 2 pcie cards one with the raid and another data. But how would they share the data if the SATA is not in the hardware raid pool.
Without knowing what ypu plan is in detail, here’s one example of a plan for a NAS…
You wouldn’t need to exchange all of them at the same time as long as the one you are swapping in can hold all the blocks the old one did.
That's what I was thinking but my wires are mini SAS to SAS and they are in a 1:4 ratio.
Like this
Wouldn't that mean that it would be impossible to make a drive data it they are connected in 4s
The cable connections don't mean anything. SAS is multichannel and with expanders (expanders work like ethernet switches) one controller can interface with hundreds of drives.
The cable you have pictured is called a breakout cable that dedicates one of the cards individual channels to a drive. If you plug one drive into the cable and spin it up no big deal, add another later on same thing, move a dive from one cable to the other it's all good. The cables are just electrical data connections to the controller. With ZFS you can even migrate compatible drives from SAS to SATA controllers (SAS only work on SAS, but sata works on either) in the system and they will still function just fine in a pool. For that matter I've heard of people mixing SAS, SATA, and USB drives in the same vDev (not generally recommended) and things worked.
So are you saying these plugs will work on SATA drives?