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!
This is a PERC H700 which does not support IT mode (even if you cross-flash to an LSI firmware).
You could use that card as-is but for truenas I’d suggest grabbing a proper SAS card. I got one off ebay (LSI 9207) for about USD$35 already flashed and ready to go.
Do you recommend SAS over SATA? What would I do of I wanted to move to SATA drives and already having data on the hardware raid? How would I transfer all that?
For this use case there’s not really an advantage using SAS over SATA. I’d suggest buying SATA drives in the future just because you don’t need a SAS card for them, and SATA drives are usually cheaper.
If you use the H700 for hardware RAID and switch to SATA later, your best bet is probably to copy the data over (or better, use the opportunity to test your backup/restore process).
If you could run the SAS disks in JBOD mode (which is possible if you sell the H700 and use another SAS card), you could set up your drives in a RAIDZ1 mode and later switch to SATA drives by replacing one drive at a time and doing a scrub between each swap.
So you mean use it until I have all drives and a data card then copy my NAS to a DAS and then back to my NAS?
And also the cards as far as I know have 2 mini SAS ends so I can’t switch to data one by one, they go in fours?
Yes, you’re going to want to get SATA drives that are the same size or bigger than your SAS drives. The mini-sas will break out into 4x sas connectors but you don’t have to swap 4 at a time; disconnect one SAS drive from the SAS breakout cable and then connect one replacement SATA drive to the SATA backplane (either the one on your motherboard or to a SATA card if you don’t have enough mobo ports). Do a zfs scrub. Once it’s finished with no errors, repeat all three steps. Once all drives are off the SAS card and your final scrub is done you can remove the SAS card entirely.
Interesting, so first my best bet would be to her a non raid SAS card and the do what you said ?
Yes, if you’re going to run TrueNAS (or another solution based on ZFS) you should really get rid of the PERC and get an LSI SAS card in IT mode so that the system can see the raw disks.
When you start your SATA swap, either use the onboard SATA ports (if there are enough) or get a SATA card (more ports, probably slightly better performance than sharing the onboard controller) and start the process I described before.
Thanks for you help, I will try this. I will wait until my first SAS dies on noraidSAS card and then get a sata pcie and one by one move to sas