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!
The cable connections don't mean anything. SAS is multichannel and with expanders (expanders work like ethernet switches) one controller can interface with hundreds of drives.
The cable you have pictured is called a breakout cable that dedicates one of the cards individual channels to a drive. If you plug one drive into the cable and spin it up no big deal, add another later on same thing, move a dive from one cable to the other it's all good. The cables are just electrical data connections to the controller. With ZFS you can even migrate compatible drives from SAS to SATA controllers (SAS only work on SAS, but sata works on either) in the system and they will still function just fine in a pool. For that matter I've heard of people mixing SAS, SATA, and USB drives in the same vDev (not generally recommended) and things worked.
So are you saying these plugs will work on SATA drives?
Yep. I'm using sata drives in a SAS backplane that has similar connectors soldered to a board.
The exact backplane I am using is: https://files.ekmcdn.com/itinstock/images/supermicro-sas846a-24-bay-3.5-lff-sas-sata-hdd-4u-backplane-bpn-sas-846a-4-93512-p.jpg