So I currently have This Case
It has 6x 5.25 bays where I have two of This Cage/Backplane
A possible total of 8 drives in those cages, I only have 3 populated in a pool currently while I figure out what I want to do with the rest
Running the cages is a basic cheap-ish HBA with 2x Mini-SAS ports broken out to a total of 8 SATA connections
Here's my dilemma. I like to use hardware close to its full capability.
My Motherboard has 6 SATA ports and 2 NVMe slots. I am using one SATA port for a little 256GB SSD boot drive, and an NVMe using as a cache VDEV
So I have 5 free SATA ports and one NVMe slot. Also, my HBA only uses 8 lanes of the 16x PCIe slot that I can split in the BIOS to direct to 8 more lanes to another 16x slot.
My case also has 4 internal 3.5" sleds and one built-in drive caddy type on the top of the case (really cool feature BTW)
Since I can shove the 2.5" SSD just about anywhere, I wouldn't count it as taking up space.
So I guess my case as-is can hold a total of 13 3.5" HDDs, and I have total 13 available SATA connections. Seems perfect, right?
Well why do I keep looking at new cages that can hold 5 drives per cage instead of the ones that hold 4 that I have? And why am I looking up if I can split that top 16x slot in 8x + 8x for another HBA?
15 seems like such a nice number even if i don't have the drives I want to fill them with.
Somebody talk some sense to me.
Also I'm going to need some PCIe bandwidth to upgrade my network, that onboard 1Gb isn't going to cut it for very long, but I should be Okay if I don't use the second NVMe slot even if i go nuts cramming every drive possible into this build
Rest of build:
Ryzen 5600GT
MSI X570 Gaming Carbon Motherboard
48GB DDR4 3200
