Physically mounting hard drives

TrueNAS General
1

I have an HP SFF PC that has only room for one drive internally. Where’s the safest place to put my other drives without too expensive of a purchase?

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Question - If it designed for 1 drive - Will it support more than 1 drive and how?

HP SFF PC - too many models - can you be more specific?

HBA that support external drives - maybe?

3

The safest place to put your other drives is in a chassis that’s actually designed to hold multiple drives, along with your motherboard. IOW, you’re using a computer that isn’t suitable to serve as a NAS, and the safest answer is to use a computer that is suitable. Failing that, there are two reasonably-safe options for external drives:

  • Install a SAS HBA in your computer, and put the drives in a SAS disk enclosure (often called a JBOD)
  • Use eSATA to an eSATA enclosure that doesn’t include a SATA port multiplier. That would mean one eSATA cable per drive.
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4

Thanks dan, this is what I was looking for. I understand that this won’t be as great as a better system, but I’m just doing this casually with cloud backups anyways.