At what point do I just cave and buy a DAS?

[onerr4rf]

My mobos ssta ports are all full, and my pcie sata card is all full… 

[Blue4130]

14 minutes ago, onerr4rf said:

My mobos ssta ports are all full, and my pcie sata card is all full… 

 

 

Get a LSI PCIE card. Most can address 1024 drives. Doubt you'd hit the limit.

[onerr4rf]

14 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Get a LSI PCIE card. Most can address 1024 drives. Doubt you'd hit the limit.

At this rate ima need another powersupply… 

 

will I run out of pcie lanes?

[Needfuldoer]

10 minutes ago, onerr4rf said:

At this rate ima need another powersupply… 

 

will I run out of pcie lanes?

Nah. Replace the PCIe SATA card with a PCIe SAS HBA (which can also handle SATA drives). 

[ewitte]

Just move them to a NAS.  I can't stand spinning drives inside a machine I'm using these days.   

[onerr4rf]

3 minutes ago, ewitte said:

Just move them to a NAS.  I can't stand spinning drives inside a machine I'm using these days.   

I don’t have the option of wired internet, so no NAS (Im not playing games wireless) and also I can buy cheap large amounts of storage for decent performance on a spinning drive, hell in my second pic you can even see my optical drive

[onerr4rf]

6 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Nah. Replace the PCIe SATA card with a PCIe SAS HBA (which can also handle SATA drives). 

Welp bye bye cable management

[Needfuldoer]

2 minutes ago, onerr4rf said:

Welp bye bye cable management

Not if you get a card that uses SFF-8087 or SFF-8643 breakout cables. They'll trunk four drives into one connector.

 

 

I stuffed an old Antec Nine Hundred full of nine optical drives and connected them all to an LSI SAS card. Cable management was okay.

[onerr4rf]

20 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Not if you get a card that uses SFF-8087 or SFF-8643 breakout cables. They'll trunk four drives into one connector.

 

 

I stuffed an old Antec Nine Hundred full of nine optical drives and connected them all to an LSI SAS card. Cable management was okay.

Oooh, I wish my case wast glass so I could cut it apart ti have the cables come out the side to a custom 3d printed drive cage

[OhioYJ]

Those are all relatively small drives (these days). Why not start consolidating to larger drives? 

[onerr4rf]

27 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

Those are all relatively small drives (these days). Why not start consolidating to larger drives? 

Current drives are healthy and itd be a waste of monsy not to tun the into the ground, its the same reason I bought the best cpu at the time(i9 12900k) the gpu and drives are the only consistent upgrades I make, and even they are once every three or four gens 

[Mark Kaine]

That point comes when you replaced them all with 4-12TB drives (you can clone your OS drive then expand the new drive yada yada) IMHO

 

 

[OhioYJ]

10 minutes ago, onerr4rf said:

Current drives are healthy and itd be a waste of monsy not to tun the into the ground, its the same reason I bought the best cpu at the time(i9 12900k) the gpu and drives are the only consistent upgrades I make, and even they are once every three or four gens 

How much money are you going to spend trying to gain more storage space though? Your talking about setting about another system of some sort possibly (NAS or DAS)? Or buying accessories to plug in more drives? 

 

You can always use those drives as externals or something to backup important data or if you want or find someone who can make use of them. 

 

Doesn't change the fact that I'm still of the opinion larger drives would make your life much simpler. Much less I'm sure your file structures simpler 

[jaslion]

You have what? 6tb of space total? Id just sell the drives and get one or 2 disks depending how you do your backup.

 

You are spending more and more money trying to be able to run a bunch of small drives. Eventually you will end up being better off just replacing and selling the current ones as it would cost too much to keep it going in its current form of expansion.

 

It really is the do it right the first time at a higher cost to avoid doing it halfway 5 times, never reaching completed state and spending the same money anyway

[Donut417]

4 hours ago, onerr4rf said:

My mobos ssta ports are all full, and my pcie sata card is all full… 

In my opinion you got two options. 

 

1) Look in to a NAS. For reference you would not install your games on the NAS. NAS's are for backup and general data. I primarily use my NAS to store data for my Plex server (ripped DVD's and OTA TV recordings). 

 

2) Buy bigger drives and consolidate your storage. 

[PDifolco]

It's pretty much a mess of old small drives... Get a 2TB NVme, keep the archive 4TB HDD, and resell the rest, will cost less than a DAS/NAS

Then you'd only need 1 SATA connector ...

[onerr4rf]

4 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

 

 

Doesn't change the fact that I'm still of the opinion larger drives would make your life much simpler. Much less I'm sure your file structures simpler your not wrong, I do have plans to stripe data against my 2 sata ssds eventually. The biggest reason I just got a second drive for "the archive" was because it was cheap it was 30$ for a re certified 2 tb enterprise drive, and I was going to get more storage eventually. At the end of the day Im still a HS student who tries to sell video editing services and browses r/for hire frequently. I cant exactly get approval for a home server at the moment, nor can I get wired internet. once Im gone though, I fully intend to make a custom server.

 

[Ha-Satan]

5 hours ago, onerr4rf said:

I don’t have the option of wired internet, so no NAS (Im not playing games wireless) and also I can buy cheap large amounts of storage for decent performance on a spinning drive, hell in my second pic you can even see my optical drive

Hang on there lol. What all is installed on these drives? Is it all just games? How many games are you intending to keep installed at one time lol?

 

Any non-program files can be moved to a NAS, and as long as the NAS itself is wired to the router, you shouldn't have any issues accessing it from your PC.

[onerr4rf]

On 5/16/2025 at 11:50 AM, OhioYJ said:

Those are all relatively small drives (these days). Why not start consolidating to larger drives? 

money

 

On 5/16/2025 at 2:11 PM, jaslion said:

You have what? 6tb of space total? Id just sell the drives and get one or 2 disks depending how you do your backup.

 

You are spending more and more money trying to be able to run a bunch of small drives. Eventually you will end up being better off just replacing and selling the current ones as it would cost too much to keep it going in its current form of expansion.

 

It really is the do it right the first time at a higher cost to avoid doing it halfway 5 times, never reaching completed state and spending the same money anyway

I plan to have a NAS in 5-8 years depending on how some things work out, short-term though I'm thinking about a DAS in the relatively short term

 

On 5/16/2025 at 2:50 PM, Donut417 said:

In my opinion you got two options. 

 

1) Look in to a NAS. For reference you would not install your games on the NAS. NAS's are for backup and general data. I primarily use my NAS to store data for my Plex server (ripped DVD's and OTA TV recordings). 

 

2) Buy bigger drives and consolidate your storage. 

TBH most of my data is just games, I dont play games often, but when I do, I REALLY want to play games, so I keep them installed so I can pplay them rather than wait for downloads.

 

On 5/16/2025 at 5:10 PM, Ha-Satan said:

Hang on there lol. What all is installed on these drives? Is it all just games? How many games are you intending to keep installed at one time lol?

 

Any non-program files can be moved to a NAS, and as long as the NAS itself is wired to the router, you shouldn't have any issues accessing it from your PC.

A large variety of files, lots of odd software some linunx isos some videos, tons of photos, and ~ 2.5 TB og games, I dont game much(time issues) so when I do I REALLY do. waiting for downloads kills the vibe, when I get home Ill have to post a pic of my desktop. whenever I move my current pc will likely get some adjustments in the allocation of pcie slots and become a homelab server/NAS. as an ipod user and iCloud disliker, my biggest space savings will likely be in music and phone backups

[Donut417]

5 minutes ago, onerr4rf said:

TBH most of my data is just games, I dont play games often, but when I do, I REALLY want to play games, so I keep them installed so I can pplay them rather than wait for downloads.

Then buy higher capacity drives. But you also may want to look at SSDs as well because a lot of newer titles either recommend or downright require an SSD. 

[onerr4rf]

Just now, Donut417 said:

Then buy higher capacity drives. But you also may want to look at SSDs as well because a lot of newer titles either recommend or downright require an SSD. 

good thing new games suck lol

[wanderingfool2]

28 minutes ago, onerr4rf said:

money

Honestly when you are looking at spending like $200 on a DAS at a certain point it's just better buying a larger HDD. (Prices in CAD)

 

Like I could buy a Seagate IronWolf Pro drive for like $375 14 TB harddrive, and yes it will cost an extra $175...but realistically if you buy a $200 DAS you should be filling it up with more than $175 in harddrives...even if you didn't though, you could still get like a 6 TB drive for the cost of a single DAS.

 

At that point you could just swap out one of the hard drives and have a ton of room.  Not sure how many of  your drives are SSD's though...but even at the sizes you have you could probably spring for a 1 TB ssd to replace a few of your smaller ones to free up the extra space.

 

Even a 2TB Samsung SSD would be the price of a good DAS...so you could just use that partition it in half and use it to replace your A/F drives and how you have a spare slot as well (so you could recycle using your F drive if you want the extra 256 GB).

 

I do understand that money can be an issue...but given the sizes of your drives it's probably more economical just doing with a single larger drive to replace something like your F drive (and then you also have a spare slot to put in a cheap leftover drive).  Or if you do need more room on your games one, just upgrading it to a 1TB SSD

[Ha-Satan]

35 minutes ago, onerr4rf said:

A large variety of files, lots of odd software some linunx isos some videos, tons of photos,

All of this stuff can go on a NAS or DAS no problem.

 

35 minutes ago, onerr4rf said:

and ~ 2.5 TB og games

This shouldn't be a problem to run with just a couple drives in your PC.

[Donut417]

7 hours ago, onerr4rf said:

good thing new games suck lol

While it's not new, it's newer and thats Baldur's Gate 3. Me and a buddy are almost done with the second play through and are planning a 3rd where he goes dark urge. But other than that, Im not interested in most newer games. 

[Kisai]

14 hours ago, ewitte said:

Just move them to a NAS.  I can't stand spinning drives inside a machine I'm using these days.   

NAS is not an option if it needs to be local storage, like programs.

 

There's three solutions

1) Buy bigger drives (18, 20, or 22TB drives)

2) Buy a external SAS HBA card and basically have a "server" HBA storage array. This is probably not viable with a desktop.

3) Buy a second computer that is designed for a NAS, and either A) Use it directly attached (basically just 2 10GBe ethernet cards, one in each machine, and then setup the drives as iSCSI targets instead of local object storage. or B operate as a NAS using object storage and just use it that way.

 

Until you have two desktops that need the same data, a NAS is usually not what you want.