New guy here with some questions.

So I recently bought a Dell PowerEdge R710 that I was hoping to install either UnRaid or FreeNAS on. Within one of those I was wanting to run either Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin and a few other things maybe within virtual machines.

The server I have now has a PERC6i raid controller connected to 2 300gb SAS HDDs and an on board 1gb NIC. 24gb of ddr3 ECC RAM and dual Intel Xeon E5649 processors. Any other questions about the server I'll try and answer best I can.

My hope was to get a disk shelf to add additional media storage. Preferably something that can house high capacity (10tb) SATA drives (Since I already have quit a few of those). And that is about where I get lost. If I buy a disk shelf to house those drives, how do I connect it to the server to add to the UnRaid or FreeNAS array? Or is any of that even possible? If so, what all would I need to buy to make this work?

Any help or pointers would be great. Thanks!

 

All you need is an HBA with external SAS ports (SFF-8088). I use a quad port one that connects to two 8 disk DAS boxes I made myself.

 

What kind of hardware do you have in the DAS boxes?

And if I were to run unraid on my server, could I just add storage as I progress and it'll adopt it into the array?

 

Check my post here. And yes you can keep adding storage to unraid. You just can't add drives larger than your parity drive(s).

 

Oh gotya so the "box" you made is the u nas setup?

 

Yes. Two of them. They both connect to my server and appear to the system as directly connected.