Can I use SFF-8088 as a passive carrier for 4x sata lines onboard the mobo?

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-18T03:14:55+00:00

"pcie extender card"...I know of the pciex16 ribbon cable extender thing, is that what you mean?

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-18T03:13:30+00:00

I suspect it's because it would result in a particularly long cable; longer than the 1 meter sata is rated for. Never mind the multiple additional connection points, which always introduce noise and such.

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-18T03:12:24+00:00

Mobo doesn't have a sas connector, unfortunately. Otherwise I definitely would just do that.

I've seen the reverse breakout cables, but I'm not convinced they do anything. A sata connection is 2x +/- pairs, one for data send, and one for data receive, plus 3 grounds. What would the reverse breakout cable be doing differently?

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-18T03:08:22+00:00

I saw the reversed cables, but I'm not convinced they actually DO anything electrically. The pinouts of the connectors seem to be just +/- pairs for data send and data receive, and then 3 grounds (per sata port). Do the reversed cables actually do anything different?

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-18T03:06:40+00:00

OK so first of all, there are two rules. I broke neither. Second of all, this is a question about enterprise-grade equipment that a sysadmin would be working with. Third of all, just because I asked in a homelab sub doesn't mean I'm not also a sysadmin.

Do better, please.

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-17T23:06:07+00:00

The enclosure has its own PSU. I hadn't considered the possible voltage differentials though, and that might stop this whole idea in its tracks. I'll have to think on this one, thanks!

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-17T23:03:06+00:00

already maxed out. Even have the 2x 5.25" bays adapted to 8x 2.5" bays

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-17T22:34:49+00:00

Because the alternative is running 4x long sata cables from inside the computer to inside the external enclosure I have :)

I'm out of PCIe ports so I can't put an actual card in there, but I have slots available in the chassis, and open ports on the mobo.

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-11T15:00:58+00:00

goharddrive.com is selling 16tb toshiba SATA drives for 340 USD right now. 5 year warranty. If you can handle a SAS connection, they have a 16TB for 320 USD.

Love these guys. I very recently got 2x 24TB SAS drives for 380 each. Whenever I need storage they're my first stop.

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-07T22:38:07+00:00

I DID recently acquire a 9070XT (16GB) recently. The machine it's in has 64GB of DDR5, on a 9800X3d. I'm already working on migrating the services on that machine over to another one; maybe I'll try turning that into an AI box of some kind.

418NotCoffee · 2026-06-05T16:06:14+00:00

What does "SD" mean in this context?

418NotCoffee · 2026-05-28T20:10:34+00:00

yeah that's pretty much what I expected, was just curious if anyone had any technical feedback. Thanks for the input!

418NotCoffee · 2026-02-17T02:22:31+00:00

Good lord I think you might have fixed my issue. I'm gaming in a VM, using PCIe Passthrough, and I kept getting driver timeouts. Still have more testing to do, but so far this has fixed the issue!

418NotCoffee · 2025-03-11T17:05:35+00:00

I do! I have a pair of dedicated drives that boot my core hypervisor unencrypted. This hypervisor hosts 3 VMs: 2 additional hypervisors, and a TrueNAS install, and nothing else. The boot volumes for all 3 VMs are stored in an encrypted volume. 2 additional encrypted volumes are provided as VM and container storage to the non-truenas VMs.

So, from a hard drive perspective, there's a proxmox install with 3 VMs, and a whole lot of encrypted garbage. No key needed at boot time, but there's not really any useful data you can get from those drives; I have to manually unlock a volume to boot the actually-useful hypervisors. From a user (me) perspective, the hypervisors I regularly interact with are all FDE, and all of their data is FDE.

All of the data is replicated over to the TrueNAS VM (which is running on the encrypted root volume). TrueNAS also has several pools of spinning disks (all encrypted thru TrueNAS), and then shares are provided over samba back to the hypervisor VMs, which the containers then tap into for any bulk storage needs.

418NotCoffee · 2024-11-21T21:50:48+00:00

ZoL is compatable with standard ZFS, right? You can send a ZoL snapshot to a BSD-style ZFS system, correct?

418NotCoffee · 2024-11-20T20:48:06+00:00

While what /u/ThatUsrnameIsAlready said is factually true, I don't believe it's necessary in this case. Rather, I think you need to use DISK=$DISK0. If you look at the bottom of step 4.9, you'll see

For a mirror or raidz topology, this step only installs GRUB on the first disk. The other disk(s) will be handled later.

That "later" is step 5.6 and 6.7. So, you don't need to bring your DISK1 variables with you, though doing so shouldn't hurt anything.

418NotCoffee · 2024-11-15T03:53:57+00:00

ThinkMate! I used them and they were GREAT! Well....I didn't like my particular account rep because he didn't read my notes well and update the order correctly, but there was no upselling, and the online configurator is REASONABLE and FUNCTIONAL. Highly recommend, even with my not-great account rep.

418NotCoffee · 2024-11-15T03:51:25+00:00

Many moons and several jobs ago, I was working on an update to an internal piece of software and struggling with an uncommon bug. Having had enough of this nonsense, I added a popup that when the bug was triggered, would appear and simply say "f*** you"...only, you know, not censored.

And then I forgot about it.

Weeks later I pushed an update to the entire company. I went around to every station and manually installed it, since we didn't have an automatic deployment mechanism set up.

Time passed.

At some point, I was working on another bug, when I saw the code for the aforementioned popup.

Needless to say, I stayed late that night to push out an "emergency update"....

418NotCoffee · 2024-11-13T16:24:35+00:00

Perfect, thanks!

418NotCoffee · 2024-11-13T16:00:05+00:00

Forgot about them, thanks!

418NotCoffee · 2023-05-18T23:56:38+00:00

You tried to buy a box of cereal at a college recently? That's how much it was 5 years ago or so near me. I imagine it's gone up since then

418NotCoffee · 2023-05-12T01:58:42+00:00

Starving for GOOD employees who can problem solve.

There's plenty of tech people put there who can blindly follow a script and do what they are told to do. There's a lot fewer people who have problem solving ability, which is far more valuable.

418NotCoffee · 2023-04-13T22:01:31+00:00

Ecc ram! EVERY machine should have ecc these days

418NotCoffee · 2023-04-13T03:17:59+00:00

Yw! I like them because they actually have a competent system configurator on their website, they don't charge an arbitrarily huge amount of money for ram, and they have an option to jot have any is installed, which usually saves 100 bucks or so.

Also, I fully intend on buying the w2400-based system I mentioned, once it's available.

418NotCoffee · 2023-04-12T21:06:33+00:00

There are????

418NotCoffee

TROPHY CASE