jowdemanne

Oh god, I need Microsoft Edge for 4k netflix... Damn, I really wanted to watch everything at a faster pace, I hate watching at 1x speed, it's so slow...
Even then, it means I watch 1080p on a 4k monitor.
When I tried to play youtube 1440p at 1.5X it had a lot of problems keeping up, constantly desyncing the audio.
Edit: and it seems I need a new GPU indeed. A GTX 10XX series are a 7th gen Intel CPU.
 

Ok I will and post the results.

Some quick advice on Raid5...don't.
 
If you use a parity based system, always use at least double parity.

Yes I have 28 gigs of ECC RAM, knew it was needed for ZFS, thanks anyway :-)

virtual machine inside virtual machine, inside a virtual machine, and so on...

So to recap (and so I can make this the solved post if people want to know more about it):
- A SAS expander is like a router that splits up a SAS connection in more, but keeping the same bandwith of course
- Every SFF-8087 connector has 4 lanes, each having the bandwidth associated with that generation of SAS
- You could buy an enclosure with an expander inside of it, meaning you'd only need 1 SFF-8087 connector to connect to the whole aray (keep in mind your bandwidth is for example 12 Gbps * 4 / 24 = 250 MBps per drive)
- Having an expander still means you need an HBA or native SAS ports in your case
- SAS backplane can take SATA drives 
- You can transform 4 SATA ports (for example on your motherboard) into one SFF-8087 connection with a reverse breakout cable, no SAS drives can be used then (of course)
- If you buy an HBA or ebay it is possible you need to 'flash it to IT mode'
Thanks to @scottyseng @leadeater @Lurick @Jarsky @.:MARK:. for the great advice and info!

So to recap (and so I can make this the solved post if people want to know more about it):
- A SAS expander is like a router that splits up a SAS connection in more, but keeping the same bandwith of course
- Every SFF-8087 connector has 4 lanes, each having the bandwidth associated with that generation of SAS
- You could buy an enclosure with an expander inside of it, meaning you'd only need 1 SFF-8087 connector to connect to the whole aray (keep in mind your bandwidth is for example 12 Gbps * 4 / 24 = 250 MBps per drive)
- Having an expander still means you need an HBA or native SAS ports in your case
- SAS backplane can take SATA drives 
- You can transform 4 SATA ports (for example on your motherboard) into one SFF-8087 connection with a reverse breakout cable, no SAS drives can be used then (of course)
- If you buy an HBA or ebay it is possible you need to 'flash it to IT mode'
Thanks to @scottyseng @leadeater @Lurick @Jarsky @.:MARK:. for the great advice and info!

So to recap (and so I can make this the solved post if people want to know more about it):
- A SAS expander is like a router that splits up a SAS connection in more, but keeping the same bandwith of course
- Every SFF-8087 connector has 4 lanes, each having the bandwidth associated with that generation of SAS
- You could buy an enclosure with an expander inside of it, meaning you'd only need 1 SFF-8087 connector to connect to the whole aray (keep in mind your bandwidth is for example 12 Gbps * 4 / 24 = 250 MBps per drive)
- Having an expander still means you need an HBA or native SAS ports in your case
- SAS backplane can take SATA drives 
- You can transform 4 SATA ports (for example on your motherboard) into one SFF-8087 connection with a reverse breakout cable, no SAS drives can be used then (of course)
- If you buy an HBA or ebay it is possible you need to 'flash it to IT mode'
Thanks to @scottyseng @leadeater @Lurick @Jarsky @.:MARK:. for the great advice and info!

Actually, that's what I'm doing right now :-P. I'm using virtualbox to try some things with freenas and it in turn runs a virtualbox jail on which I'm installing ubuntu :-P

@leadeater thanks for the name! I knew there was something like it but couldn't come up with a good google search term :-)
So it is possible with the right cables, which means I could actually buy a case with 6 internal mini SAS ports, put 8 drives in them and connect them via the SAS backplane back to 8 SATA ports on the motherboard. Would save me a lot of money :-)

That is correct, SAS disks are dual port so with the expander and one SAS connection you can have either 12 SATA disks or 24 SAS disks single path, should have explained that. Speed doesn't change.
 
If you plug a SATA disk in to a secondary path port with one SAS connection on the expander it just won't show up since its not actually connected.

So i could just search ebay for like 1 of those cards and I could already use it for 8 drives (I am planning to expand, having only 5 drives in right now and upgrading with vdevs of 5 drives as I go bigger). 
I've searched a bit on ebay and found those cards are like 60 bucks, so that's way cheaper than I previously thought!
So to recap, I'm going for ZFS so I'm gonna need 3 HBA's (LSI 9211-8i / IMB M1015 / IMB M1115) and I can just connect all those mini SAS connectors to the connectors the case has in the front.
Thanks everybody for the info! I think I have what I need now.