I’m considering moving away from my 3 disk array (22 TB total) in Unraid to an all SSD pool setup. My plan is to buy some of those refurbished 7.68 TB PM1643 SAS drives since I have a LSI 9207-8i SAS controller.
I can see that my SFF-8087 cables will need some kind of SATA → SAS adapter, but that should be easy to source, however I’m unsure what’s the best method of moving all this data over. My server case is a Silverstone cs382 and does have a SAS backplane, yet I read that mixing SAS and SATA drives in the same environment is a bad idea.
My end-goal is to combine my old server and gaming PC, into a single PC which I will use Windows 11 as a VM and convert the old server into a backup server, and I really don’t like the noise from HDD’s in my living room, hence the reason for going all SSD.
So would it be crucial to keep a couple of HDD’s for ZFS snapshots, since these will be done by a script at night and they won’t run 24/7, or should I rather focus on a backup server? I wonder if the ZFS snapshot is just unnecessary for my needs.
??? According to the case spec sheet the backplane does support both SATA and SAS. I don’t think you need any new cables.
A zfs snapshot is a pointer within the zfs file system. It prevents reallocation of used blocks, but it is not a backup that mitigates the risk of drive failure.
Keeping a copy of your data on a separate drive (or drives) in the same computer (e.g. by using zfs send/receive of zfs snapshots) does mitigate the risk of drive failures in the original zfs pool.
However, a hypothetical catastrophic event that affects all parts of the computer may affect both sets of drives (think PSU failure frying all electronics in computer case; or thief stealing computer case).
Keeping copies in a separate computer (backup server), especially if not running 24/7, mitigates against an additional set of risks to data loss.