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!
I did the same only it was an online order and was 600 worth of drives. 1 sas controller later and I’m happy
search lsi 9300-8i on eBay. 12G SAS3 under $20 nowadays.
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.
eBay
- $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.
