OT, but I've got one of those 3x5.25 to 5x3.5 hot swap bays in my main system and I love it. I'm using it with an LSI 9207-8i as my motherboard only supports a few SATA connectors with several already used, so needed something to provide more ports for future expansion for my main system's storage. For more drives, you can use one of those external drive shelf boxes. I currently have the HP M6710 I got off eBay with all caddies for about $100, which can house 24 2.5 hard drives in a 2U chassis and I've used an LSI 9201-16e to access it (both HBAs flashed to 20.00.07 or something like that). I've already tested it and it works great, though a bit loud on the fans when powering on. My understanding is also if you have more than one of these shelves you can daisy chain them via their ports SAS card -> Shelf 1 -> Shelf 2, etc, even cycling back to the SAS card for multi-path support (which is at the time over my head). My plan for it is to put in my network closet once I get it cleaned out and cabling ran better to provide whole-house NAS storage. I think there is also an M6720 model for 24 3.5 drives in a 4U chassis. There is also NetApp shelf I was looking at but from reading looks like it uses a QSFP connector on it's IOM, and the cables that converted from SFF-8088 were quite expensive. On 9/13/20 12:01 PM, Wols Lists wrote: > On 13/09/20 13:50, John Stoffel wrote: >> I know, I really need to buy another drive, but my main system is >> full, so I *also* need to either get a new case, or one of those 5 x >> 3.5" into 3 x 5.25" bay cages to make some room. Decisions... decisions... > I know I keep on saying it, but I really think I'm close to getting my > new main system (and hence my development system) sorted, and I think I > need to buy one of those cages too. > > If you did get those two 8TB drives, you could still have your 8TB 3-way > mirror without needing any more bays/sata-ports. > > My problem, of course, is if I'm playing with raid layouts I need as > many disks as I can cram in :-) I'm counting 6 tucked away in my drawer, > which means I'll almost certainly need to add an add-in 4-way sata card, > and as those drives are a mixture of 500GB and 1TB, I'll probably split > the 1TBs into 2x500GB and ignore md complaining that I have multiple > components on the same physical disk ... > > Cheers, > Wol
