I’m looking for hardware recommendations to complete a build for 4 Seagate ST6000NM0034 SAS drives. My wife ordered them for a NAS she was building, but her enclosure is SATA-only, and she had a typo when she searched. Change that 3 to a 2 and you have the equivalent SATA model. Life happened and we missed the return window, so I have 4 brand new SAS drives that need a purpose.
While I do have several laptops that I could attach to an enclosure, they’re older and have USB A ports. So, I’m looking to do a full build with new hardware. I’m currently running a 1 Gigabit network, but I’m planning to upgrade, so I’ll want to go with at least a 10 Gig interface on my build.
I would suggest looking over the Resources section for sample builds. If the server doesn’t have a built in HBA, you would need one of those to attach to SAS.
Your question is a bit open ended as you don’t list if you will be planning more disks and what you have planned for a pool setup. Mirror pairs, Raid-Z2?
Viewing the Hardware Guide section of online TrueNAS documentation may help you out too.
Thanks. I’d already searched in the Resources section with SAS as a tag. I’ll check the hardware section of the documentation. I don’t have plans to add more disks. I was thinking of going with RAID-5.
USB-attached enclosures are generally NOT suitable for ZFS. Typically, you’d have SAS drives in a rack with a SAS backplane. But you can host SAS drives in consumer-style cases with a SAS HBA.
You’re right, I’m dragging terminology forward from external USB drives that doesn’t apply. I even have a spare port on the network hub sitting on my desk.
I’ve not seen any USB to SAS chassis or adapters. So it is SAS HBA only.
If you end up wanting an external enclosure for the 4 x SAS drives, this is one of the few I have seen. (Have not used, nor any knowledge of it’s reliability…) Just don’t get the RAID card they sell with it.
QNap and Icy Dock offer enclosures that support SAS drives. Many, if not most server platforms from Dell, Supermicro, and HP naively support SAS drives. Used enterprise hardware on ebay is your friend. Personally I prefer Supermicro, maybe look at the CSE-826 platforms. Be mindful of the backplane that is installed, SAS2, SAS3 etc…
Yeah, I was going to recommend the cheap HP D2700 SAS disk shelf I picked up for £60, but:
it’s big, runs hot/noisy and uses a lot of power
the caddies will wind up costing more than the device itself if you don’t already have a supply of them
Also, I think it’s worth mentioning for clarity (as some people get confused): SAS is backwards compatible with SATA in that you can use SATA disks in a SAS enclosure with a SAS HBA, but you cannot use SAS disks with a SATA enclosure/controller (they’re not even physically compatible). You can also connect a SATA enclosure to a SAS HBA.
The gotcha is that as soon as you connect a SATA disk to a SAS HBA all the SAS disks’ capabilities will be downgraded to SATA, including transfer speed.
The SATA downgrade of SAS is per port. Thus, if you have an 8 port SAS HBA and wire up 1 SATA disk, the other 7 can still be used as SAS ports. (Or more SATA disks.)
It is a little more complicated when dealing with SAS Expanders. The HBA to SAS Expander lanes remain 100% SAS. However, any SATA disks plugged into a SAS Expander force the SAS Expander’s communication for that specific disk port to be “SATA protocol tunneled over SAS”.
This allows any number of SATA disks, on any connection, direct HBA or Expander. In fact, a SAS Expander is a great way to get several dozen SATA disks wired up to a storage server. More so because the connection between SAS HBA & SAS Expander can be >1 meter. Like for an external disk tray. That is generally beyond reliable distances for SATA, (or eSATA).
Note however, the connection between a SATA disk and SAS port, (HBA or SAS Expander), MUST still be short, following the SATA electrical standards. Not the SAS disk to SAS port standard.
