Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
Personally, I recommend the lsi cards. Those things are tanks. The lsi 8i (8 internal) has been my friend for many years without fail. It does support jbod, so no raid, and I hooked a tape drive up to it too.
Tell me more about your tape drive though, I'm unhappy with mine and I'm looking to replace it
Sorry but I haven't got the tape drive yet. I found an HP lto-5 ultrium 3000 on ebay but I'm not sure if it's a good choice
What I know: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/A_guide_to_mdadm No need to do hardware raid, mdadm is great. I got an HBA card off of art of server on eBay, and have ungodly amounts of disk. Also, am ungodly power bill... You can stick regular SATA drives into a SAS Bay, but not SAS drives into a SATA bay. Some HP equipment is bitchy about non -HP drives, cards, etc. I saw a fair amount of "Do RAID 6!" But I found on my hardware that RAID 5 and a hot standby was moderately faster. Try not to mix drive sizes, it messes things up and wastes space. Have fun!
Yes the Dell H310 will work, but be around 40$. Other good options:
There are also other cards from less known brands, just search ebay or aliexpress for LSI 9211-8i or LSI 9207-8i.