External 8 bay case

[Ray Milyard]

I have a FreeNAS built with my 8 drives. I have 2 IBM M1015 cards. Using one for the 8 drives. The case has 8 hot swap bay. Is there a way to use the other IBM card to something external with 8 bays?

 

[jgreco]

Yes. You can bring out an SFF8087 connector to an SFF8088 backplate. Look in this forum at the stickies:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...-sas-sy-a-primer-on-basic-sas-and-sata.26145/

It'll help explain this to you.

In particular, I'm going to say "you may not want to do this" because there's a significant risk of pool damage if, say, for example, half your pool is inadvertently de-energized or disconnected.