Hi, anyone could point me at an ELI5 about SAS hardware? I’d like to assemble a NAS using an old HP Z200, I want SAS because I’d get also a tape drive for backups and I cannot find SATA tape drives. For example, is a Dell Perc H310 pci-e card good for me? Can I avoid hardware RAID?
What I know: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/A_guide_to_mdadm No need to do hardware raid, mdadm is great. I got an HBA card off of art of server on eBay, and have ungodly amounts of disk. Also, am ungodly power bill… You can stick regular SATA drives into a SAS Bay, but not SAS drives into a SATA bay. Some HP equipment is bitchy about non -HP drives, cards, etc. I saw a fair amount of “Do RAID 6!” But I found on my hardware that RAID 5 and a hot standby was moderately faster. Try not to mix drive sizes, it messes things up and wastes space. Have fun!