Seagate 8TB 7200 RPM SAS 12Gb/s 3.5in 256MB Cache | 512e | ST8000NM0075 | Enterprise Exos 7E8 HDD and COMPATILY Aluminum Hard Drive Carrier Screw Kit - Bundle (Renewed) w/ 2 Year Warranty

I'm new to SAS drives and chose two of these to expand my FreeBSD-ZFS server. The drives do not come with any cables. The manual is available online. The manual is very thorough, with the exception of telling us what kind of connectors to use! I learned the drive takes an SFF-8482 connector. This is an interesting connector which has both data and power amongst the pins. This is different from SATA drives, which have separate and data connectors. You can purchase a couple of different variants of SFF-8482 cables to connect your drive. Since motherboards generally have SAS data connection, and you must power drives from the power supply, the SAS cable comes to the rescue. One cable variant has a SATA power connection, and the other has a Molex power connection. You will also need to know the SAS connector type on your motherboard. My SuperMicro mobo has an SFF-8643. This looks almost square with two small connectors stacked vertically. There is another mobo SAS connector called an SFF-8087 which looks like a longer rectangle with a single connector. Learn which kind of SAS connector your motherboard has so you can purchase the proper cable.Next I learned that my mobo has a separate SAS drive controller (Broadcom 3008). Drives must be configured through it before booting into the OS. Paying careful attention to the power-up screens, the first one said "SAS controller initializing.. hit Ctrl-C to enter the setup utility". There, I configured the drives in a hardware RAID configuration. Unfortunately, I heard ZFS hates this, but there was not much I could do about it. The least offensive choice my controller presented was a 2-drive RAID-0 mirror. Long story short, your SAS drives will probably not appear automatically like SATA drives do. You will have to figure out how to configure them through your SAS controller.The controller took about 12 hours to format the drives (!) I easily set up a GPT partitioning scheme, added a freebsd-zfs partition, and created a new zpool on it. Using the iozone program, I can get up to 3.7 GB/s reads and 1.3 GB/s writes. This is pretty good as my SATA Intel SSDs give me 3.6 GB/s reads and 3.2 GB/s writes. I am very happy with the drives' performance.

They came packaged great, with lots of protection. I bought 6 of these for my desktop PC. I run a LSI 9361-8i raid card because I never lose data when redoing Windows and it's great for all the additional features when you have that much storage. The drives run quiet, fast and very smooth. You definitely notice a difference with SAS over SATA. I haven't had any issues with the drives, but just a tip if you're doing the same thing has me. Don't use regular SATA power cables, make sure you use Molex to Sata adapters. That was the only issue I had come up. The extra screw driver sets were a great bonus on already great deal.

Worth buying