All, thanks in advance for your help.
I have used FreeNAS for many years. My builds have always been hardware that is laying around rather than purchased on purpose for the task at hand. I am sure I have a non-efficient solution, but it hits the spot that I need and it makes me feel good to get some more cycles out of that old hardware.
I now find myself needing to expand my storage. In years past, I tended to move to larger disks and keep the numbers of disks down to where I could fit them into the case that was going to by my NAS. Very easy. I am now at a point where I would like to take advantage of an external case for the drives. I want to step up the game here and get to hot swappable disks and the ability to add to the array with less hassle.
Here is where I am hitting the limits of my knowledge. I know that I could go the route of a bigger case and put the mother board in there with enough sata ports to drive all of the disks, but I would prefer to go to an external case dedicated to the drives. The question is what is the correct way to connect that case? I have searched high and low and where I keep getting is either the solution where the NAS is a self contained box (like I have now) or the external enclosures are either full blown NAS already or they are metal DIY enclosures. I get the DIY approach to build the self contained, but not what is required for the stand-alone drive enclosure.
I know it is not an elegant solution to route a bunch of sata cables out of the back of the computer over to the external enclosure; what is the elegant way? eSata connectivity keeps popping up, so I am thinking that might be it, but if it is, how does that apply? It seems that this would allow for a single cable to go from the computer to the enclosure, but what happens on the enclosure side? Is there a board that would take this single cable input and burst it into the right number of sata connections for the drives housed there? I did read the term "port replicator" a few times without explanation. Is that the device?
I am familiar with the concept of a back plane for blade servers, does an external drive enclosure have to have that? What is required to be able to get a drive (and enclosure) to be hot swappable? I tend to refrain from popping the cover off my current NAS and yanking a drive out with it spun up so I would imagine that there is more to getting this feature than having a quick disconnect drawer. Am I right?
Anyway, I apologize for the length of this email and for (what I am sure to be) the basic nature of the questions, but I have been searching high and low for answers. If you can share some insight and/or point me in a more effective direction for my searches I would be most appreciative.
I have used FreeNAS for many years. My builds have always been hardware that is laying around rather than purchased on purpose for the task at hand. I am sure I have a non-efficient solution, but it hits the spot that I need and it makes me feel good to get some more cycles out of that old hardware.
I now find myself needing to expand my storage. In years past, I tended to move to larger disks and keep the numbers of disks down to where I could fit them into the case that was going to by my NAS. Very easy. I am now at a point where I would like to take advantage of an external case for the drives. I want to step up the game here and get to hot swappable disks and the ability to add to the array with less hassle.
Here is where I am hitting the limits of my knowledge. I know that I could go the route of a bigger case and put the mother board in there with enough sata ports to drive all of the disks, but I would prefer to go to an external case dedicated to the drives. The question is what is the correct way to connect that case? I have searched high and low and where I keep getting is either the solution where the NAS is a self contained box (like I have now) or the external enclosures are either full blown NAS already or they are metal DIY enclosures. I get the DIY approach to build the self contained, but not what is required for the stand-alone drive enclosure.
I know it is not an elegant solution to route a bunch of sata cables out of the back of the computer over to the external enclosure; what is the elegant way? eSata connectivity keeps popping up, so I am thinking that might be it, but if it is, how does that apply? It seems that this would allow for a single cable to go from the computer to the enclosure, but what happens on the enclosure side? Is there a board that would take this single cable input and burst it into the right number of sata connections for the drives housed there? I did read the term "port replicator" a few times without explanation. Is that the device?
I am familiar with the concept of a back plane for blade servers, does an external drive enclosure have to have that? What is required to be able to get a drive (and enclosure) to be hot swappable? I tend to refrain from popping the cover off my current NAS and yanking a drive out with it spun up so I would imagine that there is more to getting this feature than having a quick disconnect drawer. Am I right?
Anyway, I apologize for the length of this email and for (what I am sure to be) the basic nature of the questions, but I have been searching high and low for answers. If you can share some insight and/or point me in a more effective direction for my searches I would be most appreciative.
