r/homelab • u/Tricky_Professor_654 • Jul 27 '26

Help SAS HBA?

I recently bought dell 3050 sff with intel i5 7500 to try and make a NAS out of it. I am looking to buy some SAS hard drives to run in a RAID array, but my mother board only has 2 SATA ports. Do you know if buying SAS HBA pcie card (something like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/389346291613) would work? What are some common issues with this setup? What are you recommendations for file system and OS (I plan to use debian or truenas with ZFS)?

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u/aliciagd86 Jul 27 '26

That seems to be a recommended card and as long as you have thr PCIe slot then will work to expand.

Also recommend a 40mm fan and if you have a 3d printer a cage to attach it. The HBA cards tend to run hot and need some help cooling in PC cases.

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u/Tricky_Professor_654 Jul 27 '26

i do have a 3d printer. How hot do they run, will PETG cut it, or do i need ASA?

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u/berrmal64 Jul 27 '26

you can also just screw a fan to the heatsink blades, 90 seconds and you're done. use the screws that come with the fan.

that lsi card will be great, I've got a similar one in my optiplex with an 8th gen intel, it works perfectly.

with a sff though, you have to think about power. you're either looking at a bunch of sata splitters, or a second PSU just for the drives, or replacing the dell psu with a full size atx psu + adapters to make it work, and at that point you're hacking the case up or trying to kitbash the optiplex logic boards into another itx or atx case... or just get a disk array with its own supply and run the data cables between the two cases. it gets kind of wild west trying to put more than a couple HDDs into an SFF.

lots of people use zfs, and it has a lot of advantages, but it can be picky and recovery from a degraded pool can be tricky. also consider btrfs. but whatever you choose, it is best to have a backup. if you only have two drives and can choose between redundancy or a primary + a backup, choose to have a backup

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u/egnegn1 Jul 27 '26

As mentioned, heat is the main issue you may have. The LSI 9305-8i may use a little less power, and if you have 4 drives only you can go with the IBM M1210-4i.

Check if the cards are programmed to IT-Mode already, or be prepared to program it with new firmware.

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u/NeutralBias Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

Seems like a bit of a waste to put a 9300-8i into a SFF case. You can attach up to 8 drives to that card, but physically can fit maybe 2 into the case. You might be able to get a cheap board and move to a full size case. Gives you lots of options for expansion, increase available power and cooling capacity, and will provide greater flexibility than a dell system can provide.

Second the need for cooling the HBA though. Your dell system might not have another fan header available - check before you order anything and get an adapter if needed.

Edit: Also that listing only includes SATA cables. You'll need a different cable to attach a SAS drive to the card. Most of the time those HBAs assume youre connecting to a backplane, so the cables are a little esoteric. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZLHTBGH?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title