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Add more drives when I dont have more sata ports or power

Go to solution Solved by danalog,

That's a very inefficient way of powering the drives but yes it will work.  Instead, consider that the 12V rail on your Dell power supply can run several more drives - I would recommend the SATA power daisy chain cable from StarTech (well built).

When it comes to connecting those drives to the system, a cheapo PCIe SATA card will work just fine - or if you want, search for an LSI SAS RAID card flashed to RAID mode. You will need to invest a bit extra in cables to connect SATA drives to that card if you go this route. 

A while ago (before I knew dell prebuilts were proprietary out the ass) I bought a dell optiplex off craigslist for like $25 with the intention of turning it into a media server, and maybe backing up my PC too it. I held off until the beta for HexOS launched because I'm not confident in my ability to set up trunas or something similar, and had to wait until now to have time to build the thing.It has 3 SATA data ports, and uses some kind of proprietary BS to have 3 SATA power connectors. I plan on buying something like this https://www.amazon.com/Expansion-Ports-Express-Controller-Windows/dp/B0B2WRDXQJ/ to add more SATA data ports, but would welcome better ideas if anyone has one.

 

I have a plan to get power to the drives, but I'm not sure its a good one. Due to PC of theseus-ing myself into a better PC, I have one of these these https://www.newegg.com/antec-neoeco-650c-ne650c-650w/p/N82E16817371125?Item=N82E16817371125 PC power supplies sitting unused in my closet. My plan is to plug the extra PSU into the wall, not hook it up to the MOBO in any way, but use its 8 SATA power connectors to power the extra drives. I got the idea from Luke talking about doing something similar with his GPU during the AMD challenge, and figured I'd give it a shot. Does anyone know if this will work? If not, does anyone know if a better option? It also has the bonus that if I want to use GPU power for anything on the server in the future, I have that option

 

I am all for adding an external hard drive enclosure, but I don't know enough about networking to know if that's an option. If anyone does, let me know, point in in the direction of a tutorial, and I might go that route (depending on cost).

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That's a very inefficient way of powering the drives but yes it will work.  Instead, consider that the 12V rail on your Dell power supply can run several more drives - I would recommend the SATA power daisy chain cable from StarTech (well built).

When it comes to connecting those drives to the system, a cheapo PCIe SATA card will work just fine - or if you want, search for an LSI SAS RAID card flashed to RAID mode. You will need to invest a bit extra in cables to connect SATA drives to that card if you go this route. 

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6 minutes ago, danalog said:

That's a very inefficient way of powering the drives but yes it will work.  Instead, consider that the 12V rail on your Dell power supply can run several more drives - I would recommend the SATA power daisy chain cable from StarTech (well built).

When it comes to connecting those drives to the system, a cheapo PCIe SATA card will work just fine - or if you want, search for an LSI SAS RAID card flashed to RAID mode. You will need to invest a bit extra in cables to connect SATA drives to that card if you go this route. 

I barely trust the dell power supply to run 3 drives (2 HDD and 1 SSD), so I'm not about to split the power there. 

As for the LSI card, I am such a newbie to NAS stuff that I don't even know what an LSI card is. From the looks of listings online, it seems to just be a fancier version of what I linked above. Am I missing something?

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6 minutes ago, CoffeeLoki67879 said:

I barely trust the dell power supply to run 3 drives (2 HDD and 1 SSD), so I'm not about to split the power there. 

As for the LSI card, I am such a newbie to NAS stuff that I don't even know what an LSI card is. From the looks of listings online, it seems to just be a fancier version of what I linked above. Am I missing something?

Basically. LSI is the brand, and those cards are what servers use to run massive drive arrays. It is essentially a faster, fancier version of a RAID card like you linked, as it has a little CPU and RAM onboard to handle file operations to take load off of the main system CPU/RAM. 

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Alternative route: purchase 1 or more drive cages from Aliexpress, add a PCIe card for an external SFF8088 connector, a SFF8088 to SFF8643 adapter cable, optionally more SFF8643 to SFF8643 cables if you have more then a single drive cage and away you go. Links:

All on Aliexpress as examples, hunt around for better deals.

 

This way your Dell can be Delleted (s'cuse the pun 😛 ) when time comes and you keep all your data. Just swap the PCIe card into a new system and you're done. The Antec PSU is still wired as per your original idea and the Dell PSU only has to power the boot SSD for the system.

 

HTH!

"You don't need eyes to see, you need vision"

 

(Faithless, 'Reverence' from the 1996 Reverence album)

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