I just want reassurance that what I stitched together in my shipping cart actual will work. I am quite certain it does, but for sanity I ask for your opinions
Case:
2x 5Bay Backplane - gives 5 times 3.5" in the space of 3 times 5.25"
3x mini-SAS to SATA cable.
1x SAS HBA - as I do not want or need a raid card
All in all EUR 552,89 without PSU, MB, CPU ... do you think I could to that less expensive but still rack-mountable?
(sorry for the german amazon, but sadly just swaping .de with .com wont do the magic I learned)
Important question is, are you planning to salvage your old pc for that nas or are you goinng to buy new stuff. I wouldnt say you can save much.Basic case with icy dock hot swap costs around the same as rack case with integrated hot swaps.You could save few euros on used hba from ebay but import charges etc will make it a little difference and more problems if used item dies.BTW Does that hba you linked has correct image ?It all depends on the rest of equipment.If its consumer grade then you probably need hba for ports.If you are planning to go for enterprise stuff you could get board with more ports and skip hba. It depends how much processing power your nas needs. You could get nice serverboard with a ton of ports if its only for nas uses like that 8core atom board or a board with integrated lsi controller . If you plan to run some extra suff on your box then you need obviously more horsepower.It all depends on cpu,and mobo if you can make any savings.Also U cases with 8 hot swaps might save you some euros.If you dont need 10 hot swaps of course.I got 3U case wit 8 hot swap caddies for 179 £ today
For the time beeing I would salvage the current motherboard and CPU of my current NAS. It is fairly old but except that still good enough for now.
Well so far, those rack-cases with integrated backplane were actually pretty much more expensive; that way I cam up with that "frankenstined" variant of that 6 5.25" bay case and the IcyDock inserts.
If you have a good tip at hand, I would very welcome it.
To buy the HBA new, I actually choose by intention; Just because of the possible hassle with ebay buys.
Ok, I honestly have to admit that there might be firmware problems/limitations with HBAs. I thought it just offers more SAS/SATA ports connected to PCIe. What should I pay more attention to?
I actually thought it would be better to have a HBA that is transparrent compared to a Motherboard that has that many ports; I have been looking at the super micro mATX boards with the many SATA ports.
For horsepower, the NAS in the end should be able to saturate 4 x 1Gib/s links.. though hardly all the same time.
It actually does not need to do any extra lifting; it just shall be providing storage. For all other stuff I have my workstation and a Dell server.
Do you have a link to that? 8 would be plenty enough; I just ended with 10 bays as the IcyDocks have 5 each.
So you would say, that the supermicro mATX boards with athom (+ECC memory) would be best choice still?
I got the last one listed, I have that atom board but havent done anything beyond 2 day ram hammering test, cant say more sadly. And my other asrock server board died yesterday hehe for whatever reason.I mentioned that card beacause it looks like the connectors you linked are not for the card you linked unless the ports are at the back of the pcb, here check the difference