I bought some hard drives from FB marketplace, and the post not saying they were SAS drives or even showing that much they had the Dell caddys on them, went and drove 30 minutes to buy them. 2x 4 TB for $40, i had my head up my butt salivating at the deal so I didn’t look any closer
I realized they were SAS and i was like “Oh, i could just buy an adapter and it’ll be fine”
It was not fine. I learned you can use SATA drives in a SAS back-plane but not reversed. So I decided to just put it into my homelab but that doesnt support SAS either.
Any advice? Thank you very much!
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If high performance isn’t a necessity, unflashed Dell PERC H310s make good HBAs once you flash them to IT mode via this script. I run one and so far no issues at all. They’re like 20ish bucks unflashed on ebay if I remember correctly.
I did the same only it was an online order and was 600 worth of drives. 1 sas controller later and I’m happy
- $12 ASR-7805 (2x8643 SAS2), config toggle for HBA
- $17 Inspur 3008 (2x8643 SAS3), flashable to IT firmware
I have Adaptec controllers and I don’t recommend them, my ASR-71605 does not like heavy disk IO to multiple drives. It can’t handle full bandwidth to multiple drives at once and they start lagging or piling up the IO. And my ASR-78165 cannot deal with SAS devices that have multiple LUNs, like tape drives. The whole card locks up.
Definitely go for LSI-based cards. They are the industry standard.
Really depends on the system you’re trying to connect them to. Are we talking about a server motherboard? consumer motherboard? old laptop?
You can buy PCIe SAS cards (look for a Host Bus Adapter), but you’ll want to research whether the card you want to use is compatible with your motherboard/CPU and whether or not it has drivers for the OS you’re using before you buy one. These are intended for servers, so they’re very hit-and-miss with consumer hardware.
2x 4 TB for $40, i had my head up my butt salivating at the deal
Definitely not a deal worth salivating over. And honestly, don’t even think it’s worth buying a SAS controller for. Just chalk it up to a loss, or try to re-sell them.
uneducated fumble on my part :sobs:
Off topic, but with how cheap 8tb drives are on eBay, I wouldn’t waste a valuable SATA/SAS port on anything less these days.
Oh my god i should have checked ebay, they are really cheap and have SATA drives, even cheaper than the $40 for the 2x 4tb drives. I got two because me and my partner were gonna use them for our steam libraries
They’re not cheap everywhere unfortunately. I wish they were cheap for me!
search lsi 9300-8i on eBay. 12G SAS3 under $20 nowadays.
I’ve been using LSI SAS 9300-4i4e for my 4u 4 node supermicro server that I begrudgingly need to decommission, wife appeal for the 45u rack is at an all time low and I need to downsize haha
Sas3 capable and they allow for 4 internal lanes and 4 external lanes so you can use them to connect a JBOD to your server using the external 4 lanes. Solid buy for a homelab if you can find any, the ones with external lanes don’t come up too terribly often.
eBay
eBay is the place to go. Often you’ll see brands like HP, Dell, etc. They are most likely to be re-branded LSI raid cards. Adaptec is an alternative to LSI, I’m using both, in different servers, and they are both good.
Some cards come with batteries. If they are dead they’re expensive to replace. For homelab use, I wouldn’t be too bothered with them. For production servers, it’s more important.
If you want to use ZFS you’ll need a flash the card or buy one where it’s already been done. Expect to pay more for pre flashed cards.
I’m in the UK and prices are different here to the USA. I’ve paid as little a £5 and as much a £40 for used cards. Just depends on how urgent your purchase is.
In the UK you can buy ex-corporate SAS drives is batches of 10 and sometimes 20. Search on eBay Auction for: 10x SAS. Depends on the binding as to how much you’ll pay, but I’ve paid as little as £36 for 10x 2TB SAS drives and as much £62 for the same. The larger the disk capacity the higher the price.
I’ve found that used cards and SAS drives to be good enough for homelab use, rarely had any issues. Would I use them on a production server? No.
super cheap SAS controller
so you don’t care if they will protect your data or not? if they were super-cheap like that they could be broken or about to break. could be 10+ years old. do you really want to spend more money???
impressed how much you got out of just wanting a cheap one tbh
Tho i would expect 10+ year old stuff to be dirt cheap, i would not expect it to be stuff people are actualy buying anymore.
thanks for downvoting, block