Ask advice which hba card and expander

[MvL]

Hi,

I want to ask for some advice because you people are far more experienced with this as me . I want to buy a 24 bay hot swappable chassis of course all drives need a connection. I was thinking of using a expander with hba card or is it better not to use a expander? Can you recommend a hba card and a expander. I want to use this with ClearOS/RHEL. SO the card needs to be compatible. Already thank you for your input.

 

[PigLover]

A lot of the answer depends on other objectives and choices in your project. What are you going to use it for? Are you more driven by performance or by cost? What MB do you plan to use? Do you know how many PCIe slots it would have? Do you plan to only use spinny drives or will some of them be SSD? Etc.

I think to a large degree most people would suggest avoiding the expander. But some parts of your build might force your hand (for example, if you don't have enough PCIe slots with enough lanes then multiple 8-port HBAs are not an option). The more information you can provide the better advice you are likely to get.

 

[MvL]

You have a valid point PigLover,

Ill will use this system as my home server. I already running a home server but it's old. It's a core2duo e7200 with 10TB storage in a desktop case. I want to use a rack-mount cases in my next build. I'm running ClearOS (it's a cloud-connected Server, Network, and Gateway operating system)on my server it's based on RHEL. The server is my firewall/router/gateway. I also have Plex server (transcoding media so every device can use it) running on this server. So this is handling all my media stuff. I have a couple of other programs running like SABnzbd, Transmission, Subsonic etc. I'll use HDD's for my server only the OS is on a SSD. I want to buy the Western Digital 4TB Red's for my next build.

One question arise is it wise to run all services on one box? Maybe separate the storage from my main server. Running RAID, ZFS, unRAID, Openmediavault on that box? First i was thinking of buying a seperate NAS like the Synology rs2414+. To be honest i'm not sure if that is wise because a lot of services that Synology has will be done by my main server. Also it's not the cheapest option. I think for the money you spent on the Synology you have more bays if you build it yourself. One plus for the Synology you can use RAID with different sized drives. Another on you'r instantly ready. At the moment i'm not sure which route to go. I'll hope you can help me.