Best way to expand storage

Hey there,

I was wondering what would be the best (cheapest) way to get more storage?

I have already filled my 8 hot swap bays, and was thinking of installing a USB 3.2 PCI card and using a 5+ bay DAS via USB-C.

I found this Orico 5 bay DAS (3559C3), that can do pass thru and daisy chain multiple DAS’s like SAS could, but assuming performance would suffer the more I add, not to mention reliability due to USB.

I currently have the onboard SAS connectors free, since I am using a Dell PERC H730P, but is there a better clean way to get additional bays?

Current setup is a Dell PowerEdge T430 w/8 3.5 bays.

Appreciate all input,
Thanks

LSI HBA / SAS controller that does IT mode would be recommended with an external SAS bay / JBOD. Stay away from models that only have RAID modes.

USB is discouraged and causes problems with more than one drive. The drives don’t always get presented to ZFS as individuals. See USB section of Hardware guide

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Thanks, any suggestions on a good/cheap DAS that supports a SAS Expander?

Just trying to avoid the pains from my first Freenas install. Only had 26TB, but pidgin holed myself with the setup.

New server currently has 8x 16tb WD Ultrastars and already screwed myself by originally only ordering 4 drives, and after setup got a 5th to expand only to find out it wasn’t possible at the time and had to get 3 more.

Now I have 2x 4 wide RAIDZ2 losing half my storage to parity/buffer, only to find out a month later the recent update now lets you attach additional disks to an existing pool without needing to create a new VDEV.

Already have too much data to change it, so now I want to bring both upto 8 disks each.

There are a few SATA / SAS DAS devices out their. Not sure how much they cost. Here is one that I heard of, (but have no experience with);