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!

  • felbane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    This is a PERC H700 which does not support IT mode (even if you cross-flash to an LSI firmware).

    You could use that card as-is but for truenas I’d suggest grabbing a proper SAS card. I got one off ebay (LSI 9207) for about USD$35 already flashed and ready to go.

  • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • rook@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • mko@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Without knowing what ypu plan is in detail, here’s one example of a plan for a NAS…

        • Flash your SAS card or get an LSI card you can flash to IT mode.
        • Install TrueNAS Scale and set up your ZFS volume with your existing SAS drives
        • If any drive fails, exchange it for a SATA with at least the same size and re-silver.

        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.

        • rook@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          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

          • MuttMutt@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            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.

  • roofuskit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Get a SAS card that is in IT mode, use the SAS cables until your drives die, then buy SAS to SATA cables. Problem solved.

    • rook@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      The SAS cables go in pairs of 4…

      If one dies I have to replace 4… And the raid HDD builder won’t be able to build more that 1 at a time probably?

      Unless you were suggesting something else

  • Nilz@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    01·
    1 month ago

    You can often flash these raid cards into IT mode to disable raid and so that they just pass through the raw disks. That way you can hook up either SAS or SATA drives and run them with software raid of your choosing, like ZFS. SATA is probably the safer bet since you will be able to use them in a future build without issues, but there’s no issue with SAS.

    If you can’t flash this raid card to IT mode you can buy a cheap LSI 92xx card. They are quite common and cheap, and easy to flash to IT mode.