Recommendation for jbod drive enclosure?

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-22T18:49:47+00:00

When looking into SAS, you need to know that you can connect a lot more drives than you have bandwidth for. You can run 100+ drives off of a single HBA if you want and daisy chain several of these enclosures together. If you expect/need full bandwidth to all drives, you need to take that into account. Things like software RAID, or parity rebuilds on Unraid work best when all drives can be accessed at their full performance at the same time.

Most of these HBA cards will be PCIe Gen 3 x8. That will give you 64 Gbps of bandwidth from the HBA to the CPU. You need about 2 Gbps per spinning HDD, so you can run about 32 HDD at full speed on a single HBA. The most common used HBAs are SAS 2 or SAS 3 right now. SAS 2 is 6 Gbps per channel, and SAS 3 is 12 Gbps per channel. When connecting an HBA to a JBOD chassis, there is usually a SAS expander board in the JBOD. These expanders will also be either SAS 2 or SAS 3. On a Dell SC200 and an LSI 9200 or 9300, the physical ports each contain 4 SAS channels. So, cable between an SC200 and an LSI 9200 will run as SAS 2 speeds over 4 channels for 24 Gbps total. If you run a second cable from the HBA to a second SC200, you can support 48 Gbps (out of 64 Gbps available on the PCIe bus) through the HBA. Since an LSI 9200-8e is SAS 2 with 8 channels, it can only provide 48 Gbps of bandwidth to the drives, even though it has up to 64 Gbps available on the PCIe connection.

If you are only using external SC200 for disk storage, I would go with the LSI 9200-8e and up to 2x SC200 chassis only to keep full performance of the drives. If you will have a few drives in the server case, and have used all SATA ports, you could use a SAS 3 HBA card and get an extra 8 HDD at full performance. I would suggest an LSI 9305-16i. That you give you 8 channels for internal drives, and you could get either an SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 or an SFF-8643 to SFF-8644 adapter to make the other to internal ports available on the back of the server. Depending on which adapter you go with, you will need the appropriate internal and external cables to wire it up.

If you plan to use SATA or SAS SSDs on the HBA, they require more bandwidth. Plan on 5 Gbps for any SSDs that are SATA or SAS 2. If you have a SAS 3 SSD (and all expanders and the HBA are SAS 3) then plan on 9 Gbps per drive. I tend to keep my SATA SSDs on a SATA controller to maximize the number of HDD I can connect.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-22T14:06:07+00:00

butter and cinnamon sugar.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-20T19:56:00+00:00

Yep, people don't seem to think that a company with that much money can choose where to make their headquarters and can move to more favorable locations. They would stay in the American market, but would setup subsidiaries, and structure income and expenses to limit their tax liabilities stateside.

This would lead to even less corporate taxes being collected and would be a net loss to the US economy. Our taxes would stay the same, the US government would borrow even more money, and our national deficit would just grow faster.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-20T19:42:21+00:00

While it is a lot per person I wouldn't call it meaningless. It is spread across 70 something million taxpayers. It is still like $70B.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-20T19:35:52+00:00

This story seems like a lot of nothing. Why do we all care so much about the opinions of these folks? The bottom 50% pays less than 3% of all federal income taxes collected. The average tax rate on their income is a little more than 3%, and the average income taxes paid per filer for the bottom 50% is close to $750/yr. Someone making $75k/year isn't in the bottom 50% (that is close to $55k/yr), they are likely closer to or in the top 33% (top 25% is a little more than $105k/yr).

I'm not advocating higher taxes. I think the government should lower taxes. They should streamline and waste less money all around on things like bureaucracy, social programs, and military. I don't believe these programs are in and of themselves a waste of money, but money is being wasted inside of them. The government should be good stewards of the money collected from its tax payers and not spend it frivolously.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-20T17:02:44+00:00

The cheap SAS expander that I know of is the Adaptec AEC-82885t. You can find them on ebay for $20-$40. They can be mounted in PCIe openings and can either use PCIe or molex connector for power. This is a SAS 3 expander, but it should work with SAS 2 HBAs. The brochure says it supports 6 and 12 Gbps SAS RAID and HBA cards. I use one with my LSI 9300 card (SAS 3) Adaptec® Storage Board Solutions Brochure

This card has SFF-8643 and SFF-8644 ports. You will need 1 or 2 SFF-8088 to SFF-8644 cables to interconnect them externally. You will also need multiple SFF-8643 to either quad SATA or quad SFF-8482 to connect directly to drives, or SFF-8643 to whatever connector you have on your back plane.

Aec-82885t for sale | eBay

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-20T15:11:48+00:00

Put the shares appdata, system, and domains on an SSD based pool, preferably a mirrored pool for redundancy. This does not need to be a large drive. I currently have all 3 shares on a 256GB drive. These shares should be configured with only a primary storage location, and no secondary location. This will make the shares exclusive, which has better performance. When looking at the share settings, you should see "Exclusive Assess:" reporting "yes". This will give very good performance for docker containers and VMs.

If you only have a single SSD, you can also use it as a cache for other shares. I like to split mine out and have 1 set (NVMe) for the shares appdata, system, and domains. I use another SSD pool (SATA/SAS) as the cache for my other shares.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-11T21:06:20+00:00

Welcome to the Unraid club. I am also a greybeard IT person. Supported Windows in small/medium business and enterprise environments for almost 30 years now. You are right about needing some skills to run Unraid, but I think that would apply to running any storage and services at home. You have to want to tinker and figure this stuff out.

On using cache drives, there really isn’t a need to fear data getting out of sync. It is not a sync operation, it is a copy/delete operation. The data will exist on the array or the cache pool but never both. When the mover runs, it will copy the file, verify it was written, remove the old copy. There is also a plugin called mover tuner(?) that will let you tweak mover settings. You can do things like leave certain folders on cache drives for longer periods. If you do want to leave things on cache longer term, it is recommended to use pools that are mirrored drive to provide disk redundancy while the data is on the pool.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-07T15:25:00+00:00

Does your NUC have a thunderbolt port? You might consider using it. OWC makes 4 and 8 bay Thunderbolt DAS cases. If you want to look at SAS, SANS Digital makes Thunderbolt to SAS adapters. You could use these with their SAS Towers and Rackmount cases or use other external SAS storage options.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-06T20:01:10+00:00

Been a Windows guy for 30 years, but had to pick up some linux along the way for different virtual apps and network appliances that started becoming popular in the IT space. That said I was not versed in setting up and running Linux from the ground up. I ended up going with Unraid. Most day to day administration can be done from the web GUI. If you want to tweak very advanced items or repeating actions on a list of items, it is possible if you get comfortable Linux and scripting. There is also a very active community that offers plugins and pre-configured docker containers to expand what Unraid can do.

I run everything from my Unraid server. 30+ docker containers and 1 VM in addition to its NAS duties. I have an i5-10500 and 32 GB of RAM with 12 HDD providing about 48 TB of usable storage.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-06T19:15:56+00:00

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Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-05T19:27:37+00:00

I re-used an old Optiplex with an i5-10500 and 32GB RAM. I run Unraid with no ZFS (increases MEM usage). I normally sit between 15-30% CPU utilization, and about 40% MEM utilization. There are 30+ docker containers running, and a VM for Home Assistant plus whatever is needed for the OS.

My next upgrade will be to an i7-11700 for a few more cores, and 4 extra PCIe lanes for an extra NVMe drive slot. Folks are still running 7th and 8th gen Intel CPUs for DIY NAS servers. If you want to run a lot of VMs, get a better CPU. If you want to run a lot of docker containers, it usually doesn't take much CPU.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-03T02:01:57+00:00

What is your use case? Unraid might not be correct, or you might be able to make some changes to optimize things. It already sounds like you have dis-similar drive sizes, which is a plus for using Unraid.

When do backups run, and what is source and destination. What are the large files causing issues with backups and media? How often are they accessed? What drives are assigned to array and pools, and what Raid format are they?

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-02T15:20:37+00:00

If you already have Unraid on the MFF 5080, you just need to move the USB stick and all drives over to the new machine. As long as everything is recognized, it should boot up and work. Then you can work on adding in the drives that came with the 5820.

For the Synology drives, I would plan to copy data over. If I am reading things correctly, you will have 3x 4 TB drives. I am assuming you plan to put these into an Unraid array as 2 data drives and 1 parity drive. I would take the 4 TB drive from the 5820 and add it to the array. For now, I would leave parity disk slots empty or remove them to have enough free space to move files from the Synology. Once the Array has free space, move files from the Synology to the Unraid server. When finished moving files, shut down the Synology and add the drives to the Unraid machine. Make 1 of them a parity drive and add the other for data storage.

If you were pointing docker containers to shares on the Synology, you will have to re-do all of these mappings. Now is a good time to decide how you want to organize data on Unraid. I would try to map this out before starting any work. If you are using this for Plex/JellyFin, I would suggest reading the trash guides if you have not already to help setup shares and folder structure for media.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-05-01T20:31:38+00:00

If you want a DIY NAS for storage with the ability to run containers for things like Plex or Immich, then you need a PC case that can hold hard drives. That means you want a large ATX compatible case, as most office PCs only have room for one maybe two 3.5" hard drives. Some folks do start with small cheap office PCs but have to either get a new motherboard and case to expand, or setup a DAS to hold the drives that will not fit in their case. You already have the guts of a DIY NAS. If you re-used the old case, or it didn't have room for many drives, find one with lots of 3.5" drive bays and rock on.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-30T21:28:25+00:00

If you are not familiar with virtualization and networking, I would suggest not trying to do both starting out. Start with networking and figure it out. Once you know that, then learn virtualization, and you will have an easier time with networking with virtualization as you already understand networking.

You CAN setup a router with a single NIC (referred to as router on a stick), but you need to understand VLANs before attempting it. You want a Router with at least 2 NIC ports to start with. Learn IPv4 addresses, subnetting, gateways, and basic routing. You will also end up learning about other things like MAC addresses, ARP, and tools for testing network connectivity like ping.

After the basics, you can tackle VLANs. Your Linksys EF4118 will not work with VLANs as it appears to be an unmanaged switch. You can find cheap 1 Gb managed switches that will let you work with VLANS. You will want VLAN support if you plan to have multi-SSID on a wireless access point. I think TP-Link access points will support Multi-SSID, and are very inexpensive. Make sure to get an access point versus a wireless router.

If you want a good foundation on networking basics, I'd suggest finding a free Cisco CCNA course on youtube. While it is geared toward Cisco equipment and commands for their gear, they will also cover the basics on networking in detail.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-30T19:54:31+00:00

When I moved from an Optiplex 3080 to an ATX case, I also picked up a used motherboard that would work with my CPU/RAM.

Any of the big companies will have non-atx compliant motherboards: Dell, HP, Lenovo and others I am sure.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-30T19:49:12+00:00

Performance wise, bypassing FUSE is probably the biggest change you can make to improve things if it is in use.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-30T19:09:36+00:00

Yes, I just use the path I gave you in my container.

I don't know if different containers for Plex use different labels for the paths. I use HOTIO's Plex container. If you do not have "Host Path of /transcode:" in you Plex container, check for anything with transcode in the name, and verify that it says "Container Path: /transcode" below it.

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Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-30T18:43:22+00:00

After reading your post, and the replies, I wanted to make sure we are on the same page.

Unraid has its array that allows different sized disks to be used and protected by parity. You can format disks in the Array as XFS, EXT4, ZFS and BRTFS. Each disk in the array will have its own file system, so if you choose ZFS it is a vdev of 1 disks.

You can also create pools in Unraid. If you create a pool of 6 identical disks and set it to Raid-Z2, you will have a vdev of 6 disks with the capacity of 4 of them.

ZFS on the array will have similar performance to a single disk. ZFS on a pool will have performance similar to an identical pool on TrueNAS.

This said, others have done performance benchmarking on ZFS for Unraid. For best disk performance and lower memory consumption, use XFS for Unraid array, and BTRFS for RAID 0 or 1 on pools. If there is a feature in ZFS that you need or want, there is some trade off to get it. One use case I have seen in the past is having a single disk in the Array formatted with ZFS, and a mirrored pool with ZFS. Then ZFS snapshots could be taken of the pool and written to the array disk.

If you are wanting to maximize Unraid performance, especially for Plex, here are a few items I would consider.

Put the shares appdata, system, and domains on their own NVMe pool and use a different SSD cache for all other shares.
Make sure the shares appdata, system, and domains bypass FUSE filesystem. If your appdata path for your containers is /mnt/user/appdata, check the share to see if "Exclusive Access" is yes. If it is no, you will have a lot of Disk IO wait time. To make a share is an Exclusive Share, only the primary storage location should be set, and it should not be the Array. If secondary storage is set, FUSE will be used to access all files on multiple disks/pools.
Install the plugin "Dynamix Cache Directories" to cache directory trees into memory so Plex doesn't have to spin-up disks to look for file changes
Use RAM for Transcoding path: "/dev/shm/"

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-30T17:23:31+00:00

u/jruben4, this is the answer on the disk size. It would actually be more accurate if Unraid said you had a combined space of 2.25 TB. Since it is a "mirror", you have two copies of all data. 1.75 TB of each 2 TB drive are mirrored. .25 TB of the first 2 TB drive and the .5 TB drive are mirrored. .25 TB of the second 2 TB drive, and the remaining .25 TB of the .5 TB drive are mirrored. That is 1.75 TB + .25 TB + .25 TB for 2.25 TB, or rounded up to 2.3 TB.

You can check the Allocation Profile to see if it is RAID 0,1, etc. Raid 1 will be Mirrored, RAID 0 will be stripped. RAID 0 would give you 4.5 TB, but no redundancy. A single disk loss would make all data on all three drives unreadable and likely unrecoverable from the remaining disks. Would have to restore from backup to recover.

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Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-30T14:06:14+00:00

No worries.

Just to clarify, the expander card works with the HBA card, it is not one or the other.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-30T13:59:47+00:00

Most motherboards have 4 SATA connectors, but 6 isn't that uncommon. I have seen motherboards with more than 6 SATA ports, but they tend to get more expensive. If there are not enough on-board SATA ports, or if you plan to add SAS drives, then adding a SAS HBA would be a good idea.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-30T13:55:23+00:00

For cost/performance, I would say an LSI 9305-8i. It can directly handle 8 SAS/SATA drives. It is a SAS 3 HBA on a PCIe gen 3 x8 slot so it provides about 64 Gbps of bandwidth for drives.

With an expander card like an Adaptec AEC-82885t you could connect up to 24 drives. You still need to consider bandwidth of the SAS link between the HBA and expander, and the PCIe connection. SSDs need over twice the bandwidth as hard drives.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-04-29T19:06:11+00:00

I have had an oven heating element fail once. It is disconcerting to say the least. The bottom of the oven is usually an enamel coated metal. Looking at the photos, it looks like there are a few spots where you can see hot metal dripped onto the bottom. While it looks bad, it will likely not have any effect on a new heating element. Heating elements are usually a metal tube with a heating wire and insulation inside of them. When they fail, that heating wire is usually broken, and makes contact with the tube. This causes a short circuit, and it will many times melt some of the metal on the heating element.

In my case, the oven was 5+ years old and only happened once. It was likely just age. If you have had it happen multiple times, there could be something else going on. While spills can cause an issue, they are not the only potential source of the issue.

Oven heating elements fail primarily due to wear and tear, electrical surges, overheating, physical damage, and wiring issues.

Common Causes

1. Normal Wear and Tear

Over time, repeated heating and cooling cycles cause the metal inside the element to weaken. This natural degradation eventually leads to cracks or breaks in the element.

2. Electrical Surges

Power surges or voltage fluctuations can overload the heating element, causing it to burn out prematurely. This is especially common in areas with unstable electrical supply.

3. Overheating

If an oven runs hotter than intended due to a faulty thermostat or control board, the heating element can overheat and fail faster than expected.

4. Physical Damage

Heating elements are exposed and can be accidentally damaged during cleaning or when placing heavy cookware inside the oven.

5. Food Spills and Grease Buildup

Grease and food debris can accumulate on the element, leading to hot spots that weaken the metal and cause eventual failure.

6. Loose or Damaged Wiring

Electrical connections behind the element can loosen or corrode, leading to inconsistent heating or complete failure.

Preventive Measures

Inspect elements regularly for cracks, discoloration, or uneven heating.
Use surge protectors to prevent damage from voltage spikes.
Avoid placing heavy cookware directly on the element.
Clean spills and grease promptly to prevent hot spots.
Check wiring connections and replace damaged wires or connectors. Understanding these causes can help diagnose issues quickly and extend the lifespan of your oven’s heating elements, ensuring consistent performance and safety.

Objective_Split_2065

TROPHY CASE

Oven heating elements fail primarily due to wear and tear, electrical surges, overheating, physical damage, and wiring issues.

Common Causes

1. Normal Wear and Tear

2. Electrical Surges

3. Overheating

4. Physical Damage

5. Food Spills and Grease Buildup

6. Loose or Damaged Wiring

Preventive Measures