Best solution to connect 11 3.5" SATA disks (HDD) to Linux in term of hardware

Solution 1:

"Reasonable information technology management practices" would suggest that you purchase server hardware for such a machine, in which case connecting tens of disks to a single server is a solved problem, often done via HBA interfaces.

Solution 2:

As you can see, you won't find people here who'll understand your homemade requirements. People here have a habit to build systems like a tank, which could be supported for years.

That's because information is most valuable we ever have in the computer, so we manage it very carefully. And your question seems like you are quite careless.

Nevertheless, I have one suggestion. Consider SATA port multipliers to expand ports of the machine; I've seen devices up to 5 ports. With 6-port controller it'll be possible to connect at most 30 disks (you can't connect a multiplier to a multiplier). This technology is present in the SATA spec from the very beginning; though, it's rarely used. Test that; it could be your controller won't support that.

That was used by BackBlaze, I don't see why you need to reinvent the wheel. Notice they use huge amount of power! Also speed will suffer, because you'll have a port speed shared by all devices behind a mupltiplier connected to that port; but HDD is unable to saturate a SATA link, even 4 HDDs are unable to saturate it. But don't try to connect SSDs that way, they will crawl like HDDs.

I don't get why you refuse to try old Supermicro platform. Yes, it's old, but it has pretty enough processing power to manage a storage array of 11 hard drives and make it accessbile through a network to some computing machine. Such platform knows HDDs well and won't start them simultaneously, so power spike problem will be relieved; such platform will have a easy to access drive bay, so you'll thank the day when you decided to buy that when you have need to identify "which one" needs to be removed and replaced. And so on. Please understand, when you grow, from certain point you simply can't continue to use old techniques, they don't scale so well. And I am pretty sure 11 drives is quite a number to rethink and to not to manage them like 2 drives of home computer with desktop mobo.

Solution 3:

Since i have wrote here some people answer me and i would like to thanks thoses persons first. The solution the most reliable is to invest into server stuff, a server motherboard like Supermicro X8DT3 which have pcie x8 ports and to plug LSI Controller Card SAS 9211-8i IT Mode 8 Port 6Gb/s connected (pcie x8) to IBM ServeRAID 6g SAS Expander FRU 46m0997 (pcie x8) (via 2x SAS SFF 8088 to SFF 8088 on the input ports) + 3*SFF-8087 SATA Cable to connect up to 12 drives through one LSI Controller Card. Thanks to the community.