I have a JBOD that's full of SAS drives. They're not in RAID (it's a JBOD), so I could take one out and have any other device read it. One thing I'd like to be able to do is read drives from my laptop. It'd be nice to have just in case I'm ever in a situation where I need my data and my JBOD is unusable. Because it's a laptop, I'd assume that I would be limited to USB.
I've seen these "SAS readers" on Amazon:
These readers have gotten some questionable reviews and seem limited. I'm not a fan about how they force the drive to be vertical. And they are only able to read one drive at a time.
I've recently had an idea about getting a small computer with PCIe support, such as a Raspberry Pi 5 or Rockpro64, and attaching an HBA, such as an LSI 9211 or H310, to it. While a little iffy, I would be able to connect many SAS drives to this, and then connect this device to my laptop. It also does not seem any more expensive than one of the SAS readers.
My questions are as follows:
- Do the SAS readers actually work? And do they work well?
- Would my idea of a small computer with an HBA actually work? If so, is it feasible?
- Is there other way to read SAS drives from a laptop which I've missed?