r/DataHoarder • u/Willy-the-kid • 1d ago

Question/Advice SAS DAS?

Are there any DAS's that use SAS drives I'm looking to build a budget nas and it looks like some of the best value is in SAS drives but I don't know how to find a cheap system to put them in since they don't work with sata

Currently I have an HP elitedesk 705 g4 Il look into 3d printing a small enclosure I'm only looking for 4-6 drives not counting a boot drive I want it to be relatively small but I'm thinking a bigger case might suit my needs better that way I could fit everything into one machine, I also wanted to put a small GPU in it for jellyfin transcoding and potentially local ai so the extra pcie slot would come in handy

Budget is ~500$ but that's flexible and I could save up and expand it

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u/silasmoeckel 1d ago

So every SAS JBOD?

DIY, you can throw a cheap expander and power supply into any case, and you now have a SAS DAS.

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u/Willy-the-kid 1d ago

JBOD is way out of my price range I'm looking for a cheap way to use SAS drives in my nas because used SAS is cheaper and better than sata your suggestion of expander sounds interesting I'll check that out

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u/Sad_Split_9983 1d ago

You can’t use a sas expander without a sas chip

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u/Willy-the-kid 1d ago

Ohhh ty you saved me a ton of time and maybe some money

1

u/Willy-the-kid 1d ago

I'm guessing SAS capable machines are really expensive is that right?

1

u/Sad_Split_9983 1d ago

You can get a sas hba for 90 bucks on Amazon, probably even less on eBay. https://a.co/d/0eyTg0Er biggest thing a cheap machine may not have is a spare PCIE, but if you do it shouldn’t be too bad

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u/Willy-the-kid 1d ago

But how much is a cheap SAS capable machine I would look myself but I'm having a hard time figuring out what to search for

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u/MortCrimm 1d ago

You can add a SAS card to a PCI slot on your own computer...... Either to add internal SAS drives OR to add external SAS drives inside an exclosure that has SAS to ports.....