Homelab context. Questions up front:
- Are (SAS) disk shelves + HBAs the most economic & efficient way to give a bunch of disks to a TrueNAS system?
- I’ve heard it said that SAS HBA cards need significant air flow & pressure to keep them cool (server chassis with high air flow designs).
- How true is this for my context?
- Would running an HBA in a standard ATX chassis be a real challenge?
- What are the consequences when an HBA card runs hot? Is it similar to a desktop/server CPU where they’ll not perform as well and they’ll self-regulate performance/temperature? Will they error? Will they fail prematurely?
- What are people’s thoughts on 2.5" vs 3.5" disk form factors when it comes to economy? I haven’t done my own investigation into this yet.
- I haven’t spent a lot of time around disk shelves. How hot and loud do they run? Would I notice it over say, a window A/C unit in the same room?
I’ve been thinking of expanding my homelab (specifically my NAS) for some time and have visited the topic on and off.
I want to have easy upgrade paths (mostly in terms of disk density), be able to add a bunch of disks at will as I want, and generally screw around. I see a few challenges generally.
I want used disks for economy. Those seem easier to source when a SAS interface. That generally means a SAS HBA (and maybe expanders). Not a big deal and that would seem to make the most sense for the task anyway.
The next challenge is delivering power to all those disks. There seem to be adapters which will separate out the SAS data + power into SATA power + SAS data but that doesn’t sound economic or easy to cable manage. For all I know the build quality on those is questionable and a fire hazard (akin to molded SATA <> molex adapters).
Even if I went with adapters, then I have to find a power supply with possibly dozens of SATA connections and then screw around with the cable lengths and all the rest of it. I haven’t even talked about (ATX form factor) chassis selection yet and how pricy big ones can get.
Thinking through the above challenges, the initial sticker shock of disk shelves/arrays starts to wear off. I guess I’m soliciting feedback on what people do when they want lots of disks connected to the same “head”.