Pretend your only other hardware is a repurposed HP Prodesk and your budget is bottom-barrel
Looking past the folks recommending to sell them, it seems you have a handful of useful responses here (welcome to the internet & endless September). /snark Look past the naysayers, it will be fun and a learning experience just getting these drives up and running - a worthwhile experience IMHO.
I am down a similar path now, with a bunch of SAS drives. What I have learned/experienced so far:
- Forget any USB docking stations or enclosures, they may advertise working for all SAS drives but are hit & miss expensive but cheaply made plastic crap.
- There are a plethora of adapters available online that say you can convert SAS to SATA. Do not believe them - you need a SATA controller that also supports SAS. You may luck out and have a motherboard that has the right SATA chipset that supports SAS, you may not.
As others have mentioned in this thread, the easiest & optimal approach seems to be:
- Get a low end workstation or server that supports SAS in the chipset and the drive bays
- Get a low end workstation or server that supports SAS in the chipset and that you can add the drive bays you need
- Get a low end workstation or server that you can install a controller card that supports SAS
I scored a free workstation from craigslist and one from freecycle, for another project on the workbench.
HTH, and good luck!
(Edited for formatting)
Yup, I ended up frankensteining a nas from various craigslist parts (i actually found a low-power business-class server motherboard that has worked out well for the purpose). Had to get a SAS HBA card and a couple SFF-8087 cables to do the job right, and I grabbed an old gaming case from the 2010’s to hold it all, but it was relatively seamless. I had one of the drives go out already, but luckily I had it in a raid configuration with parity so it was just a matter of swapping out the drives and rebuilding.
It’s been fun and rewarding, for sure! I’m glad I didn’t sell them like these other dweebs told me to lol
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PSU Power Supply Unit SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices
[Thread #492 for this sub, first seen 6th Feb 2024, 12:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
