Will this LSI card with 2 SAS ports support 8 SATA drives?

[zYx]

Hi all,

I get the SATA vs SAS tech (I build servers at work) and I've read the hardware guide. I need to expand my storage and NAS enclosure prices are a bit silly right now so I'm thinking about building my own.

What I don't get is that this card, made of chinesium, has two SAS to 4xSATA cables. Does this mean I can connect up to 8 x SATA drives to one card? If yes, can I use more than one card and build, let's say RAID5 storage pool and expand it in future by simply adding more cards/drives?

The above card is just one of many unbranded available on eBay.

This is for home storage, possible Plex etc and to begin with, I have 8 x 8TB drives.

 

[danb35]

has two SAS to 4xSATA cables. Does this mean I can connect up to 8 x SATA drives to one card?

Yes, or many more if you use a SAS expander in between--I currently have 28 SATA disks on a comparable controller. See:

Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy ... a primer on basic SAS and SATA

With the introduction of SAS 12Gbps, seems like "it's time" to do a braindump on SAS. Work in progress, as usual. History By the late '90's, SCSI and PATA were the dominant technologies to attach disks. Both were parallel bus multiple drop topologies and this kind of sucked. SATA and Serial...

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build, let's say RAID5 storage pool

There's no RAID5 in TrueNAS or ZFS. See:

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer

We realize that new users have a lot to learn when they come to FreeNAS. There's a certain amount of confusion added to discussions when users pick random/approximate terms to describe things. I've spent a lot of time quietly trying to translate terms on the reader's side when reading posts...

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