Server storage expansion, budget SAS-card?

[WereCatf]

My home-server with 4x2TB-drives is out of space and I'm in need of more. I bought a 4-port SATA-expansion card on eBay and I have 4x1TB-drives lying around, so that'll cover me for a while, but sooner or later I'll be needing more again, so I've been weighing my options; I can't fit an unlimited amount of 4-port SATA-cards there and the cards with more ports suddenly jump in price by ridiculous amounts, but I did stumble upon a whole bunch of all kinds of cheap SAS RAID-cards. I have exactly zero experience with H/W RAID-cards, so I am looking for advice here on whether buying one of those cheap SAS-cards would be a good idea or not.

 

My needs are simple: I only have a gigabit-network, so even a 3Gbps-card would do well enough, and I want to be able to disable the H/W RAID and just pass the connected drives through to the OS for use with Btrfs or ZFS. I'll be using regular, old SATA-disks, not SAS-disks, and a card with two SFF8087-ports, for example, would let me use 8 disks, which is much more reasonable than the 4-port SATA-card I mentioned. Oh, and my budget is pretty much nonexistent, so no 200€ cards will do. 20€ is much closer to what I can afford!

 

Now, specifically, I do not know if you can disable H/W RAID and just use the disks as-is through it and, if so, which of the various cards on eBay would be fine for this.

[Radium_Angel]

@WereCatf

Why not a NAS? Gonna be easier to set up than messing with SAS RAID and trying to turn it off

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, Radium_Angel said:

@WereCatf

Why not a NAS? Gonna be easier to set up than messing with SAS RAID and trying to turn it off

Because I already have a home-server.

[Radium_Angel]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

Because I already have a home-server.

I don't think you are going to find too many raid cards that will do JBOD in your price range, but I"m sure they are out there.

Are you using Windows, where drivers won't be an issue, or something else?

 

[WereCatf]

3 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I don't think you are going to find too many raid cards that will do JBOD in your price range, but I"m sure they are out there.

Are you using Windows, where drivers won't be an issue, or something else?

 

Windows doesn't do either Btrfs or ZFS, so no. I run Linux.

[Radium_Angel]

6 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Windows doesn't do either Btrfs or ZFS, so no. I run Linux.

Ok, then we get into driver fun. Which distro?

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, Radium_Angel said:

Ok, then we get into driver fun. Which distro?

Ubuntu 18.04, at the moment.

[Radium_Angel]

2 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Ubuntu 18.04, at the moment.

Something I have familiarity with. I have to prep for my photoshoot, I shall ponder upon this and reply when I get back this afternoon 

[WereCatf]

5 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Something I have familiarity with. I have to prep for my photoshoot, I shall ponder upon this and reply when I get back this afternoon 

Stumbling around on Google, I came upon a discussion on Perc H310 and H200, and it seems Perc H200 should do fine in JBOD-configuration. Though, if you have better recommendations, I would like to hear of them.

[Radium_Angel]

9 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Stumbling around on Google, I came upon a discussion on Perc H310 and H200, and it seems Perc H200 should do fine in JBOD-configuration. Though, if you have better recommendations, I would like to hear of them.

The only issue I have with the Percs, is I"m not certain they will work outside of Dell servers. I had an old HP-equivalent that only worked in the HP server, anywhere else the firmware refused to run things.

But if they are cheap enough, give one a swing. I have a perc 6 in my dell and it's awesome.