I aquired some cheap used SAS drives and am trying to setup a NAS with them. Other than getting a small case, normal motherboard and a SAS controller, are there cheaper options? A low end 3-4 bay NAS that can do SAS? Preferably room for some nvme drives for a cache
This is what i was expecting to hear, i was just hopeful someone knew something i didnt.
That’s silly. A motherboard with a free pci slot (I think x8? Been awhile), a cheap hba with the associated sas cables, and literally any case that will hold the drives. You could strap them all to a board if you wanted
Obviously you’ll need cpu and ram. Make sure the power supply is beefy enough to cover the amount of drives you plan to use and preferably get a good quality one if you plan to run it 24/7. I do think it’s worthwhile to get server grade hardware as it holds up better to long term 24/7 use but it’s not necessary. It’s also absolutely fine to go entirely used; my whole build was all ewaste and was maybe $300 minus the drives (which added much more). And my build was frankly overkill for a nas but I also run VMs and do some local llm stuff. If you just want to serve files for like Jellyfin/plex you really don’t need much, an ewaste pc from like 2015 will probably do the job spec wise (though increasing ram a lot can help significantly especially if you do zfs)
I have a 15 drive nas. My drives are sata but my hba is compatible with sas drives. I use an lsi 9300-16i and I have read of people using it with sas arrays just fine. If you shop around you can get it with cables for like $40-50 used (maybe more now since inflation fucked everything and you need the less common cables). Be careful because there are lots of counterfeits.
Also be mindful of cooling, the card runs HOT. I added active cooling to mine with a 3d printed bracket. If you’re only running 3-4 drives you could also get the 9300-8i which is cheaper and runs cooler, but has half the drive lanes so you’re limited in terms of future expansion.