bekopharm

bekopharm, 2 years ago

Why yes it’s a SAS drive. You can find that in some NAS models for home use too. Otherwise this is usually server land.

The thing with HBAs is that you usually only get virtual disks on the system side because the controller masks the real disks. This is not really needed any more since modern filesystems can do RAID functionality too - and even better and faster - but that does require direct access to the drive.

Many controllers can be patched though or come with a pass through (JBOD) mode out of the box, which allows you to use that kind of drive directly again. Such drives can be obtained used for cheap too so this may be a feasible option to extend the possible amount of drives for a desktop computer at home too a lot. Most controllers support 4-8 devices.