I have a Gen8 HP Microserver running Trunas Core and its running out of storage. It serves all my needs for basic file storage and PLEX. I’d like to add an additional ZFS pool of 4 SATA drives with minimal cost.
I note you can get external drive cages, which I could connect via a SAS card and breakout cable. I’d be happy going this route but the fact these products now seem old, it made me wonder.
Are there more modern solutions that would achieve the same, e.g is there such a device that functions as say, a 3-4 bay USB to SATA enclosure that would allow direct access to the drives. or would there be a more obvious solution? Some kind of iscsi for example?
Note that I wouldn’t want anything too loud or power hungry.
Getting a SAS card, cabling and enclosure is actually quite a bit more pricey than you except. USB to SATA adapters are not a great idea as a permanent solution (they’re unreliable long term and performance limited).
Your best solution would probably by getting two fairly decently sized HDDs and replace your current ones or at least partially (apart from looking at something new). That being said, I would like to remind you that you are running on a ~10y old platform so take reliability etc into consideration and it’s not very power efficient. Unfortunately the motherboard is also proprietary so you can’t transplant it to another case.
There is something called SATA PM but you need another controller for that (as the built in Intel one doesn’t support PM), it’s usually a bit limited on bandwidth and can be unreliable.
I have a similar issue and I’m on Ivy Bridge which is one generation later than yours
Yes, Fibre Channel. But that’s not really intended to address mass storage devices, more routers and switches.
But there’s also U.2 and U.3, based on PCIe and NVMe. PCIe gen 3 is notably faster then SAS (3.5GB/s vs 1.2GB/s for SAS, 0.55GB/s for SATA) and newer generations of PCIe are faster still.
ZFS is designed to be expanded on the go. No need to add an additional pool. Just add the new drives to your existing pool and capacity and performance will be increased. Multiple pools are worse performance and double the administration effort compared to vertical scaling everything in a single pool
just noticed this is an old thread and probably obsolete. But the point still stands for everyone else
