The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/bitcrushedCyborg on 2025-04-25 17:29:10.
I'm a student and a data hoarder on a budget. I've noticed that used SAS drives routinely go for much cheaper than SATA drives of the same capacity (it's not even close - my local electronics recycler has SAS drives listed for less than $6/TB, while it's hard to find SATA drives for even $10/TB and when I do find them they're usually in lots of several drives 1TB or smaller). I'm Canadian and shipping + USD to CAD conversion rate + import taxes mean that importing large capacity drives from SPD or GHD isn't feasible, and I can't usually afford to add more than a few terabytes of disk space to my hoard at a time anyway (I'm also trying to avoid buying stuff from the US due to the ongoing tariff war).
However, I don't have any hardware I can just add a SAS card to. My daily driver is a laptop (Gigabyte Aorus 15p), and an old Lenovo Thinkcentre USFF is my dedicated data hoarding PC (no accessible PCIE slots on that particular model, and a SAS card wouldn't fit in the case regardless). I mainly rely on externally powered USB docks to use 3.5" SATA drives (almost all of my hoard is kept in cold storage whenever it's not actively being added to/backed up/verified/viewed/shuffled around), but as far as I'm aware no such thing exists/can exist for SAS. I also need to travel by plane on a semi-regular basis with all my stuff for my studies (parents live on one end of the country, my university is on the other - I've had my lifestyle described by a friend as "semi-nomadic"), so rack mount units and full-size PCs aren't really an option since I'm already running low on suitcase real estate.
Just wondering if the community has any suggestions for inexpensive and portable ways to add SAS drives to my setup? NAS, DAS, I'm not picky as long as it's no larger than a toaster, is inexpensive or can be readily found on the used market, and will give me a way to use SAS drives. I don't expect you nice people to hold my hand and tell me everything, but I would be really grateful if someone could suggest a direction to start looking in. This also might not be a feasible thing to set out to do and might need to wait until I have a more permanent place of residence and can use physically larger hardware, so please let me know if that's the case.