ServeTheHome.com

Welcome to 2011! Over the past year, the ServeTheHome.com readership has grown by almost 25 fold. In visiting other forums, I have noticed that each forum has a specific purpose. Windows Home Server, FreeNAS, unRaid, general data storage, general memory and motherboards and etc. What is lacking is a single place to discuss direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS), and storage area networks (SANs) in a single place. Specialized forms are great resources for in-depth support of platforms, however the advice can be far from objective. Read the full story

After completing the first DAS/ SAS Expander JBOD enclosure project I realized that there was a major area of improvement. Using less than 30% of a large 4U case’s volume for useful purposes seemed like the key area to improve upon. As I was completing that build I soon realized that I wanted a secondary server to be able to access some of the drives for EXSi or Hyper-V virtual machines. Further, NAS operating systems that run poorly in virtual machines, such as unRaid require dedicated server for testing. I could have built another server in another enclosure, but I decided that I could improve upon the original design and access drives that are housed in the Big WHS ecosystem through a simple cable swap. This eliminates the need to physically move drives from enclosure to enclosure. The following is a slightly (approximately $20) more expensive version of the original Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure with a HP SAS Expander iteration.

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