Well, the good thing about sas is, the odd thing about them you wouldn’t care about in a data center but would at home is, you plug them into a SAS HBA, which are cheap and available all over ebay. That, and they typically draw a bit more power than a SATA drive would, but it’s not far off from consumer NVME drive power draw. I actually forget which is higher.
If you want to save a buck
The thing to look out for is which SAS connector the card has, and that it’s running in IT Mode
The product name will have something like 4i or 8i in it, indicating the number of drives you can connect. It will also have 1 SAS connector per 4 drives you can connect; this is normal and what you want. If you see a bunch of SATA connectors instead, these are still SAS cards, but avoid them anyway because you’ll need to buy more junk to use them.
LSI 9207-8i 6Gbs SAS 2308 FW:P20 PCI-E 3.0 HBA IT Mode For ZFS FreeNAS unRAID | eBay
This card is 8087, as are most of the cheaper SAS cards.
Look at the shape of the connector, and copy the name; it’ll be something like SFF-8087 or something. Other than the card, you need the SAS breakout cable to match. It should look like it fits the plug on your card on one end, and plugs into 4 very wide SATA connectors on the other. This is because these connect to both power and data at the same time. Aside from that, you plug standard SATA power into each of the cables.
Mini SAS SFF-8087 To 4 SAS SFF-8482 Hard Drive Forward Breakout Cable RAID HBA | eBay
The cable costs as much as the card most of the time. Note the wide connection with a plug for SATA power on the back. That’s what you need to plug into a SAS drive. The cables with smaller SATA datas on the end will need an adapter, and you cannot plug SAS drives into a SATA port, even with a SATA → SAS adapter; those are for plugging SAS drives into a SATA cable connected to a SAS port.
And that’s it! It’s just SATA drives with extra steps. You might need to format from 520 to 512, but that’s just typing some stuff into a terminal, and there’s a topic on the level 1 forums tutorialising that process with very clear instructions for SAS SSDs.
But, it’s up to you if the price premium is worth it to not have to think about plugs and cards, or wait for a used LSI card and expensive cable off ebay that’s shipping all the way from china. There’s nothing hard about using SAS SSDs, like there is with U.2, where you have to worry about actually cooling 25w of SSD, or having enough PCIE connectivity to plug them in anywhere. But, depending on the money you have to burn, and how much you value your time/are scared of PCIE cards, it’s a valid choice either way. I don’t judge. 