ZFS Hardware question.

[cornbread]

I'm rebuilding my NAS because I've got too many drives.


I've got 6 3TB drives, 6 2TB drives and 6 1.5TB drives

I'm thinking about this board:
Supermicro MBD-X9SCM
www.ebay.com/itm/390635509119

With This processor:
Intel G2020
www.ebay.com/itm/360874429718

With 4 of these cards:
Dell SAS MY412
http://www.ebay.com/itm/360923611256

I'll be putting 16GB ECC ram in it to start.

The NAS will only be for media storage and retrieval.

It looks like my total will be somewhere around $350-500 depending on auctions.

Does anyone have any advice on these cards or maybe something cheaper to get all of my drives up and running?

Thanks in advance!!

 

[cyberjock]

My advice is to NOT buy those "RAID" cards... we don't recommend RAIDs and you are totally on your own to figure out if they will work, if they work properly with FreeNAS, etc.

We have stickies that explain this very simple yet very common mistake.

 

[cornbread]

ok, I just saw a post saying that they were cheap and worked well so I decided to ask. I'm glad I did :)

For my setup what would you suggest to get 16-20 drives running in the cheapest way possible? I was hoping not to have to buy 3-4 $100+ cards.

 

[cyberjock]

Either buy a 2-3 M1015s or go with 1xM1015 and a SAS expander. Either case, you are potentially looking at $200-400 depending on the actual number of disks.