Thanks for you help, I will try this. I will wait until my first SAS dies on noraidSAS card and then get a sata pcie and one by one move to sas

Interesting, so first my best bet would be to her a non raid SAS card and the do what you said ?

So you mean use it until I have all drives and a data card then copy my NAS to a DAS and then back to my NAS?

And also the cards as far as I know have 2 mini SAS ends so I can’t switch to data one by one, they go in fours?

That’s what I was thinking but my wires are mini SAS to SAS and they are in a 1:4 ratio.

Like this

Wouldn’t that mean that it would be impossible to make a drive data it they are connected in 4s

The SAS cables go in pairs of 4…

If one dies I have to replace 4… And the raid HDD builder won’t be able to build more that 1 at a time probably?

Unless you were suggesting something else

Do you recommend SAS over SATA? What would I do of I wanted to move to SATA drives and already having data on the hardware raid? How would I transfer all that?

What I’m worried about is that once one drive fails, then I won’t want to replace it because I want to go full SATA. But then that would mean my NAS storage would shrink and loose data.

That means that I have to replace all drives to data at the same time, and if I have lots of data on the hardware said SAS drives. How do I transfer all that data to the new drives ?

Any ideas? The best I can think of is to have 2 pcie cards one with the raid and another data. But how would they share the data if the SATA is not in the hardware raid pool.

It shows up in try has as one big 18TB drive (I have 24tb, so raid is working).

How do I configure that? Just put it in one pool? In truenas terms what do I do with the 18tb?

It has mini SAS connectors that have SAS connections on the other end.

Do you think hardware raid is any good?