Long story short, I found a very inexpensive Dell Precision T7500 and have been playing around with it. I upgraded it to dual xeon W5580s (from dual 5520s). I just found 4 Seagate Cheetah 15k.5 SAS drives for $15. I didn't know SAS was a thing until after I bought them (I thought I could just use SATA cables).
I believe the Dell has an internal SAS controller but the inputs just look like regular SATA connectors. I also don't have any cables to connect to the SAS drives (I have plenty of SATA cables... and I'm tempted to "modify" them to make them fit on the SAS drive).
So, what should I do? Buying an SSD and tossing/selling the drives would be the easiest option, but I like a challenge. And I'm cheap. And I haven't been able to test to see if the drives even work yet.
Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing?
I believe the Dell has an internal SAS controller but the inputs just look like regular SATA connectors. I also don't have any cables to connect to the SAS drives (I have plenty of SATA cables... and I'm tempted to "modify" them to make them fit on the SAS drive).
So, what should I do? Buying an SSD and tossing/selling the drives would be the easiest option, but I like a challenge. And I'm cheap. And I haven't been able to test to see if the drives even work yet.
Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing?