Hey all, this one has kept me puzzled for quite some time. I currently have a 45-bay home server (an old Backblaze Storage Pod 3.0) but it is very slow. ZFS scrubs are taking 22 days to complete. I'm worried that if a drive fails, it will take too long to rebuild.
So I have a Storinator XL60 from 45Drives heading my way. However, I'm struggling to decide how to attach 60 drives to a single host. 45Drives recommends 4x LSI 9305-16i HBAs, but to go that route, I would need 4 PCIe slots, and my current motherboard only has 3. I'm open to a new motherboard, even a new CPU/RAM, but I need QuickSync support, and even finding a motherboard that has both QuickSync, ECC, and 4 PCIe slots is proving challenging. The case has 16x SFF-8643 cables that run to the backplanes.
So then I started looking into SAS expanders, but I've never used them before and with the parts I'm able to find it seems I'm either under the required 60 ports or way over. It just doesn't seem to work well. Also bandwidth is a concern as I can't seem to find a definitive answer on if using SATA 6Gb drives will drop the entire SAS HBA->Expander link to 6Gb or if it would still operate at 12Gb.
Have any ideas?