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Honestly you bought the wrong card for internal SAS hard drives. You can make it work with some adapters but it is going to get messy.
As you have discovered the SFF-8088 port is on the back of the card for connecting an external box of drives. You can use an SFF-8088 to 4X SATA cable like this and loop the cable from outside your case back inside.
https://www.amazon.com/CableCreation-SFF-8088-Female-Controller-Backplane/dp/B013G4EX9K/
But this won’t work with your SAS hard drive. That cable is for SATA hard drives and SAS drives have an extra bit of plastic to prevent connecting a SATA cable.
You can use this SFF-8088 to SAS cable and loop it from the back of your case to the inside but you see it requires a bunch of Molex connectors to provide power for the drives. If you had that many free Molex connectors then buy this cable.
https://www.amazon.com/Mini-SAS-SFF-8088-SFF-8482-Power-Cable/dp/B08NGJ7F5K
What you really should have bought is an LSI SAS HBA “8i” or “16i” card that have SFF-8087 ports designed for internal use. Then you can use this cable with connectors to the SAS data ports on the hard drive and then uses SATA power connectors to power the SAS hard drives.
https://www.amazon.com/AdcAudx-Mini-SAS-SAS-Cable-Internal-SATA-Power/dp/B09Q33VV5V/
You could get a bracket like this and an 8088 to 8088 cable to connect outside your computer and then it would effectively give you an SFF-8087 port. Then you could use either of the SFF-8087 to 4X SATA or 4X SAS cables.
https://www.amazon.com/CableDeconn-SFF-8088-SFF-8087-Adapter-Bracket/dp/B00PRXOQFA/
https://www.amazon.com/CableCreation-External-26pin-SFF-8088-Cable/dp/B013G4F3A8/
All of the cables above are normal forward breakout cables. When you read the manual and it says that the 4 internal SATA ports support SAS drives it is technically true but how do you connect them? The people who would use that feature are usually connecting to a SAS backplane with an SFF-8087 or other type of SAS port. So they would use a reverse breakout cable but you don’t have a backplane so forget about that.
You could get a case like these
https://www.newegg.com/black-supermicro-cse-512l-200b/p/N82E16811152222
https://www.newegg.com/istarusa-d118itx-30/p/N82E16811165293
But it may be difficult to securely mount the hard drives. You might need to 3D print some brackets to align with the motherboard mounting holes. Then if you have an SFF-8088 SAS port on the back of your main box use a cable like this or a variant of it and thread it through a hole in the new case.
https://www.amazon.com/Mini-SAS-SFF-8088-SFF-8482-Power-Cable/dp/B08NGJ7F5K/?th=1
Honestly you are really limited with 1U and not a full length rack. In the long run it would probably be cheaper to replace the rack if your storage is going to continue to grow.
Does your server use a server motherboard? Or are you reusing a desktop style motherboard as a server?
A lot of server motherboards support IPMI which allows access over the network to change BIOS / UEFI settings and install the OS remotely and stuff like that.
Anything eSATA is probably over 10 years old now.
If it is an enclosure with just 1 hard drive then it will probably work fine. If you are looking at an eSATA enclosure with multiple hard drives then it probably has a SATA port multiplier inside. SATA port multipliers require specific port multiplier support from the main SATA controller in your PC. As far as I know none of the Intel or AMD SATA controllers on a motherboard support port multipliers. You have to use another PCIE SATA card with support for that. My experience with them 10 years ago is that they are all flaky and will suffer from random disconnects and dropouts.
USB3 is far more popular now and basically killed eSATA. USB can also have problems with random disconnects.
How many drives do you need in the external enclosure? Commerically available SAS enclosures are expensive. If you have an old PC case and power supply you can make that into a SAS enclosure with a few cables and adapters
Get an LSI SAS HBA “8e” card like this
https://www.ebay.com/itm/163534822734?epid=28034148027&hash=item26136f5d4e:g:5sEAAOSwdwlcX2E3
A couple SFF-8088 to 4X SATA cables
https://www.amazon.com/Female-3-3FTCable-Controller-Target-Backplane/dp/B08NGGPPCY/
A power supply jumper like this
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0756WFMNF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I’ve got 8 drives in an old PC case like this and it works great with no disconnects ever.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after
This machine kept working but was missing for 4 years. They traced the network cable and found it got buried behind a wall but it was still working.
almost all of them don’t have built in hardware RAID. I don’t really trust software RAID. Mostly rebuilding if the software crashes or my hardware crashes. Even if I was ok going with soft RAID
Most people here are the exact opposite of you and don’t trust hardware RAID especially cheap implementations in a USB based DAS box. Software RAID is far more flexible and makes your setup independent of the hardware RAID cad dying.
A NAS is great when you have multiple simulataneous users. What kind of computer do you have? Do you have a desktop computer in an ordinary case? How many drives can it hold internally? If you’ve run out of space just buy a bigger case and move the motherboard etc to the new case and put the drives in the same case as the rest of your computer.
Aren’t you scared about loosing your data?
No. I still have files from 1991. I’ve got files that have migrated from floppy disk to hard drive to QIC-80 tape to PD (Phase Change) optical disk to CD-RW to DVD+RW and now back to hard drives.
What if I get a ransomwarei don’t realize and all my backups get encrypted too?
Then you need to detect the ransomware before you backup. I use rsync --dry-run and look at what WOULD change before I run it for real. If I see thousands of files change that I did not expect then I would not run the backup and investigate what changed before running the rsync command for real.
Or if the backups are corrupted
I have 3 copies of my data. Local file server, local backup, remote file server.
I also run rsnapshot on /home every hour to another drive in the machine. I also run snapraid sync to dual parity drives in the system once a day.
I generate and compare stored file checksums twice a year across all 3 copies to detect any corruption. Over 300TB I have about 1 failed checksum every 2 years.
and my disks breaks?
If one of my disks breaks I buy a new one and restore from backups.
But also I’m afraid about cloud
I don’t use any cloud services because I don’t trust them.
Same here. He also has a Youtube channel with lots of great info
It looks like the source of the bug is identified and fixed.
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15579/commits/679738cc408d575289af2e31cdb1db9e311f0adf
[2.2] dnode_is_dirty: check dnode and its data for dirtiness #15579