Can you think of a use for a load of SAS drives?

steinooo · 6 Aug 2019 at 21:02

hi all,

I've been tempted to build a homelab as I may be able to get my hands on servers soon, but mainly a tonne of storage in the form of a variety of SAS 2.5" drives.

Is there a technology I could make use of to bundle them all into and maybe try out some of this software raid stuff like Xpenology, Opennas, Unraid etc?

LizardKing · 6 Aug 2019 at 21:33

The caddy's will be more use than the drives imo

, unless your after capacity just get some cheap SSD's that work with the raid cards.
2.5 SAS are noisy and generally run quite hot. Not ideal in a home environment.

steinooo · 6 Aug 2019 at 22:31

LizardKing said:
The caddy's will be more use than the drives imo , unless your after capacity just get some cheap SSD's that work with the raid cards.
2.5 SAS are noisy and generally run quite hot. Not ideal in a home environment.

Oh. Thought there'd be a way of experimenting (labbing) large storage pools.

I get your point about heat and noise, but I have a garage

Stephanie Peterson · 6 Aug 2019 at 22:46

If there small ones, not a lot of use to be honest - but 1tb or so.. .yeah a nice storage server like i am building out of an old HP server would do.

Avalon · 6 Aug 2019 at 22:59

As above it depends on the size and what you plan on doing with them. Unless you have a very specific reason, it’s usually just a waste of power.

Semple · 6 Aug 2019 at 23:10

As above power wastage would be the main concern. If you're buying an old server just for the sake of plugging in a load of old sas drives, it'd be significantly more expensive than just buying consumer grade gear.

We haven't designed our storage solutions to use 2.5" SAS drives in at least 6 years. We've had them in the head in raid 1 for the OS and the rest of the storage is bulked out with 3.5" SAS.