Very new to self hosting and truenas.
Got an old dell with 6x4tb of storage. Turns out they are all SAS drives and turns out hardware raid is the old thing now. Knowing none of this before what can I do with SAS drives connecting to my raid card (in photo) knowing that this is just a home NAS, SAS drives are more expensive and better to just go SATA.
What do you think?
Get a pcie to data, sell all the SAS drives and save up for 6x4tb of Seagate data drives?
What would you do with a dell server with old SAS drives if the end goal was a dependable home NAS for important home files?
I’m new to this so any input helps, thanks!
It has mini SAS connectors that have SAS connections on the other end.
Do you think hardware raid is any good?
Hardware raid limits your flexibility, of any part fails, you probably have to closely match the part in replacement.
Performance wise, there’s not much to recommend them. Once upon a time the xor calculations weighed on CPU enough to matter. But cpus far outpaced storage throughput and now it’s a rounding error. They continued some performance edge by battery backed ram, but now you can have nvme as a cache. In random access, it can actually be a lability as it collapses all the drive command queues into one.
The biggest advantage is simplifying booting from such storage, but that can be handled in other ways that I wouldn’t care about that.
Definitely don’t use hardware raid