I want to build out a growable NAS using ZFS. I'm a bit confused about the chassis options when looking for chassis with a large number of drive bays. I have seen, on this forum and others, discussion about the supermicro chassis. However, when looking on ebay, I see that these often, but not always, come with a motherboard and cpu and whatnot essentially having another computer within the chassis. What I would like is to buy a cheap used computer with, by today's standards, modest specs, say a dell c1100 with 72GB RAM and 2x Xeon L5520s, slap in one or two of the LSI SAS HBAs, and connect external chassis that only hold disks to the c1100 via SAS. In my research, I believe such a configuration is called direct attached storage (DAS), but seeing the supermicro and other chassis suggestions with whole computers in them already, it doesn't fit what I believe to be a DAS chassis. Furthermore, looking on ebay and elsewhere for "DAS enclosure" is unfruitful. I would like the external chassis to support large capacity (8TB+) SATAIII HDDs and SSDs, which apparently many of the older backplanes have problems with. I do not need the multihomed feature of SAS. And by growable NAS, I mean I want the ability to buy one chassis for drives now, and a few months down the road buy another chassis for drives, and then another a few months later, etc.
Am I misunderstanding how these supermicro chassis work?
What chassis should I be looking at?
Any other considerations I have overlooked?
Am I misunderstanding how these supermicro chassis work?
What chassis should I be looking at?
Any other considerations I have overlooked?