sas SAS Drives in a desktop? Help please.

[No sleep Neftali]

I was fortunate to get in my possession 7, 8TB SAS drives that I would like to utilize in a home data storage server project I'm planning. I'm going to use an old dell precision 3630 that i got still new in box plus some minor upgrades for the project and I want to connect 3 of the SAS drives for a raid 1 set up in windows server and keep the other 4 drives as spares. The thing is, with the SAS drives I don't know where i would even start in getting to connect them to an ordinary desktop. I would like to utilize their full duplex ability and rated 12Gb/spec speeds even thought its super overkill. (I mainly want to expose myself to the technology first hand and learn about it more). To my knowledge i would need a PCIe expansion card to do that but will any work? Also how what kind of connector would i use? All I know is I'll need a SFF-8482 connector for the drive end. More insight would be appreciated, I don't mind buying expansion cards or cables. Thank you.

[Average Nerd]

41 minutes ago, No sleep Neftali said:

To my knowledge i would need a PCIe expansion card

Yes.

Depending on if you want to use Hardware or Software RAID, you either need a SAS RAID controller or a SAS HBA card (in IT mode!) with the proper cables of course.

[Kilrah]

You'll want something like an LSI 9300-8i. can go older too with HDDs, 9200-8i can be half the price or so.

 

12Gb/s is useless on HDDs, they typically won't even use half of a 6Gb/s link. 

[No sleep Neftali]

@Average Nerd There is a lot more I didn't know then i thought. for starters I didn't know there was raid hardware and software. I thought it was simply a configuration mostly universally supported. I would prefer the most streamlined ease of use option. The drives would be internally in the desktop case so i think an HBA card would not work as from what i could find the drives connect externally on that one. IT mode also seems complicate from my brief research.

@Kilrah The drive say on them 12GB/s but this machine wont be under heavy loads so i see you your point. Do you think the LSI 9300-8i or 9200-8i will work with no issue in a dell desktop? Also i think i found the cables i need for those cards, ill attach an image, could you confirm they will work?

[Average Nerd]

4 hours ago, No sleep Neftali said:

The drives would be internally in the desktop case so i think an HBA card would not work as from what i could find the drives connect externally on that one. IT mode also seems complicate from my brief research.

There are internal HBA cards, you can also buy them preflashed to IT mode.

I'd say the most easy option would be to use something like TrueNAS for the OS, it uses software RAID and it's well documented.

TrueNAS does not support RAID cards, only HBAs!

[Kilrah]

18 hours ago, No sleep Neftali said:

i think an HBA card would not work as from what i could find the drives connect externally on that one.

An HBA is just "an interface card for drives", they can have external, internal or both types of ports.

 

18 hours ago, No sleep Neftali said:

The drive say on them 12GB/s

The interface is SAS3/12Gbps yes but a mechanical drive can't access more than 2.4 or so from its platters so it's useless unless you either use SSDs or get into schemes with large numbers of drives and SAS expanders.

 

18 hours ago, No sleep Neftali said:

i think i found the cables i need for those card

They use different ones and how should we be able to make sure from a picture rather than a listing... the 9200 uses SFF-8087 and the 9300 uses SFF-8643. Drive side connector is correct.

[No sleep Neftali]

20 hours ago, Average Nerd said:

There are internal HBA cards, you can also buy them preflashed to IT mode.

I'd say the most easy option would be to use something like TrueNAS for the OS, it uses software RAID and it's well documented.

TrueNAS does not support RAID cards, only HBAs!

The only hard requirement is I need it to work for windows server.