I want to build a 16 drive ZFS NAS with 10G NIC. Possibly want to expand in the future. Currently, I have 10 HDDs and 6 SSDs. These will be in two ZFS RAIDZ2 pools respectively. General usage will be slower HDDs for media and faster SDDs for VMs. For 10G networking I have HP 649281-B21 adapter cards. I have several servers, Lenovo ThinkServer TS440 and Dell PowerEdge R330, but they are not ideal for this. Both have limited drive bays and PCIe expansion capabilities. TS440 can do 8X drives with 1xPCIe3 x16, 1xPCIe2 x4 and R330 can do 4X drives with 2xPCIe3.
I have seen threads like Supermicro 836 chassis, backplane, SAS expanders but do not know how those work. What do you recommend?
I have seen threads like Supermicro 836 chassis, backplane, SAS expanders but do not know how those work. What do you recommend?