file_haver
Explorer
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2018
- Messages
- 55
Hi everyone,
First of all i've read the section of the manual / wiki regarding best practices for upgrading your drives to larger capacity, no problems there :)
Here's my predicament; I currently would like to upgrade my NAS hardware but need to transplant my build into a different case to store more hard drives and add some SATA cards. My motherboard only has 4 SATA slots, all of which are in use. (SATA0 = boot SSD, SATA 1+3 = ZFS RAID1, SATA 2 = ZFS volume 2)
I have one more space i can mount a drive but no more SATA ports. In order to not take the single drive offline, could I use a USB hard drive dock?
I noticed the guide mentioned eSATA or adding a SATA card, but I only have USB 3 hard drive enclosures without eSATA here. However, the machine has an eSATA connector on the motherboard, so if it's the only way aside from adding a SATA card I could borrow a drive enclosure with eSATA from a friend.
I just didn't want to invest in the SATA card to do this since i plan on upgrading the entire machine I run freeNAS on in the next couple months. When I do this i plan to go to a server motherboard with more onboard SATA. (It is currently in a prebuilt PC with inadequate airflow and number of drive mounts. If i can find a case with enough drive mounts that I can mount a BTX motherboard in i would do that, but that's a different topic altogether.)
First of all i've read the section of the manual / wiki regarding best practices for upgrading your drives to larger capacity, no problems there :)
Here's my predicament; I currently would like to upgrade my NAS hardware but need to transplant my build into a different case to store more hard drives and add some SATA cards. My motherboard only has 4 SATA slots, all of which are in use. (SATA0 = boot SSD, SATA 1+3 = ZFS RAID1, SATA 2 = ZFS volume 2)
I have one more space i can mount a drive but no more SATA ports. In order to not take the single drive offline, could I use a USB hard drive dock?
I noticed the guide mentioned eSATA or adding a SATA card, but I only have USB 3 hard drive enclosures without eSATA here. However, the machine has an eSATA connector on the motherboard, so if it's the only way aside from adding a SATA card I could borrow a drive enclosure with eSATA from a friend.
I just didn't want to invest in the SATA card to do this since i plan on upgrading the entire machine I run freeNAS on in the next couple months. When I do this i plan to go to a server motherboard with more onboard SATA. (It is currently in a prebuilt PC with inadequate airflow and number of drive mounts. If i can find a case with enough drive mounts that I can mount a BTX motherboard in i would do that, but that's a different topic altogether.)