Here’s where I was wrong. First, just about everything that’ll read a SAS drive will read as SATA drive thanks to SAS’s SATA-compatible cables (just don’t try going in reverse). Second, it’s likely that most 6Gb/s drives would just run at 3Gb/s. Both of these combined mean my cost-per-GB would go way down with not having to buy “vintage” drives that were in short supply, though I would be stuck at 2Tb drives at most. Finally, and this is the most important part, I could slap in a newer, relatively cheap RAID controller in one of the PCIE slots and use whatever drives I wanted to, making my cost-per-GB go down even further as I squeezed even more density into the chassis (there’s not much price difference between 2TB HDDs and 3TB+ HDDs). According to a page on Dell’s website, an H200 RAID controller would provide me exactly what I needed.
The Pursuit of Homelabs, Part 3 – How I Learned To Love the R710
