SAS to SATA gotchas, including the 3.3v issue and the best fix for it

This post is about using SAS HDDs SAS vs SATA The actual difference between SAS and and SATA are beyond the scope of this post, but the key info here is that you can use SATA drives with a SAS controller, but you cannot use SAS drives with a SATA… Continue reading

Building a Xeon E5645 TrueNAS server with a Supermicro X8DTL-6F & SAS2008

In a previous post I detailed building a NAS from a Supermicro 1U server, using a X8DTL-3F motherboard and a Xeon E5645 CPU. I’ve made some big changes since then, so I decided that this warranted a new post rather than just an update to that post. Obviously, one change… Continue reading

Building a Xeon E5645 FreeNAS server with a SuperMicro X8DTL-3F

I’ve been running a small NAS server for several years using the excellent HP MicroServer N40L upgraded to 8GB RAM (officially its max, although I know some people have got it to work with 16GB), and with five WD Red 2TB drives, running FreeNAS v9. The N40L only has 4… Continue reading