Very new to self hosting and truenas.
Got an old dell with 6x4tb of storage. Turns out they are all SAS drives and turns out hardware raid is the old thing now. Knowing none of this before what can I do with SAS drives connecting to my raid card (in photo) knowing that this is just a home NAS, SAS drives are more expensive and better to just go SATA.
What do you think?
Get a pcie to data, sell all the SAS drives and save up for 6x4tb of Seagate data drives?
What would you do with a dell server with old SAS drives if the end goal was a dependable home NAS for important home files?
I’m new to this so any input helps, thanks!
You can often flash these raid cards into IT mode to disable raid and so that they just pass through the raw disks. That way you can hook up either SAS or SATA drives and run them with software raid of your choosing, like ZFS. SATA is probably the safer bet since you will be able to use them in a future build without issues, but there’s no issue with SAS.
If you can’t flash this raid card to IT mode you can buy a cheap LSI 92xx card. They are quite common and cheap, and easy to flash to IT mode.