Best way to add multiple HDD connections to a motherboard?

[AudioDoctor]

On 2/7/2023 at 3:57 PM, jabbr said:

Yeah you can do this. Each SFF-8643 port on the card plugs into a cable that splits off to 4 SAS drives. So then you want trayless carriers for the HDDs and then you mount all of these into your big case https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1604492-REG/istarusa_bpn_sea340hd_black_3x5_25_to_4x3_5_12gb_s.html/?ap=y&ap=y&smp=y&smp=y&lsft=BI%3A514&gclid=CjwKCAiAioifBhAXEiwApzCztu56S2uUQ7Zx3K-D_wd7s_5HIW6McYRXCoSXauRHsfhxBLkqToONYxoCWmEQAvD_BwE...

 

its doable but its a bit of work and expense and when you add all of it up, you can compare to https://www.pc-pitstop.com/15bay-12g-sas-expander-enclosure which connects to the server with a SAS3 cable and you only need 4E SAS3 card. Ok its only 15 bays but you can daisy chain the enclosures. For me, personally this was an easier option and what I do.

 

 

Those drive cages look like the biggest pain in the ass I can imagine. I was just going to put 12 drives on 12 drive trays in the case, just as Fractal shows on their website, and then plug 6 each into the two connections on the SAS HBA card. I talked to Puget Systems about this and they stopped offering those cages because they were such a pain to work with.

 

How often do you replace a drive or two? I am working on the assumption maybe once or twice a year at most.

[AudioDoctor]

2 hours ago, jabbr said:

You don't need to replace often -- every few years -- so you **could** write down the serial numbers of all the drives and then you will know exactly which drive to replace,

 

This is what I was planning on doing, as well as building the ZFS array by disk ID and not SDC/SDD/SDE/SDF/ etc...

[AudioDoctor]

@jabbr Is managing one of these any different than the equivalent number of internal drives would be as far as creating pools,, vdevs, and the like? Is there a special function one of these external expanders has to show me which drive is burnt out, for example? I am trying to figure out, other than ease of replacing a drive, what I get out of these.

[AudioDoctor]

2 hours ago, jabbr said:

Nope the SAS cable just goes out instead of in — really just a style option. If you want to daisy chain external enclosures you can. 

 

Good to know, thanks.

 

In your opinion, is my plan of a 5600x and 64GB of ECC RAM sufficient to manage a 12 drive ZFS pool and 2 Vdevs with not a lot of IO, but steadily increasing music storage for many years to come?

[AudioDoctor]

6 hours ago, jabbr said:

Nice to know it supports ECC RAM … 64 Gb is great. You don’t need much CPU power at all. 

 

Apparently all the 5000X series Ryzen do, depending on the motherboard. Asus claims all their X570 and B550 boards do with the X series chips.

[AudioDoctor]

Call me skeptical but.. Is this real ECC RAM?

 

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1729153-REG/sabrent_sb_dr5u_16gx4_laptop_ddr5_4x16gb_4800mhz.html

 

It says Integrated ECC, but I am suspicious.