I just grab them off ebay. SAS drives are almost exclusively used in enterprise servers, so there’s fuck all demand for them on the used market. Buy a cheap PCIe SAS controller card and you’re good to go.

I use Unraid which doesn’t care at all about what types of drives you use, so you can mix and match into one huge array. I have 8x SAS and 2x SATA drives in one array.

Thanks very much! Yeah it’s kind of endearingly ghetto, but I’m really happy with it.

I mainly installed the screen as an easy way to see what’s happening during boot, so I don’t have to lug the server into the other room and connect it to a monitor when I make changes to things. I’m planning on setting up a stats readout so it’s useful the rest of the time - things like network status/traffic, disk/cpu utilisation etc.

I’ve found used SAS drives really cheap. Averaged around £6 per tb.

Well… Most of it has a case.

You know it. The second best way to make things attach to things after zip ties.