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!
For this use case there’s not really an advantage using SAS over SATA. I’d suggest buying SATA drives in the future just because you don’t need a SAS card for them, and SATA drives are usually cheaper.
If you use the H700 for hardware RAID and switch to SATA later, your best bet is probably to copy the data over (or better, use the opportunity to test your backup/restore process).
If you could run the SAS disks in JBOD mode (which is possible if you sell the H700 and use another SAS card), you could set up your drives in a RAIDZ1 mode and later switch to SATA drives by replacing one drive at a time and doing a scrub between each swap.