There’s no real need to power them down. They should only use 5-7 watts. SAS2 doesn’t have any inherent speed benefits over SATA3, likewise with SAS1/SATA2 - they are rated at the same speed. It’s up to the drives.
Hard drives rarely surpass even SATA2 speeds at peak.
Agree on slow HDDs. OK, will work on them. Thanks for the advise. I hope my electricity bill don’t shoot up 
I’ve got both(wd reds and hgst sas2 drives). From what I can tell they’re essentially the same. The hgst have a slight performance boost since they’re 7200 instead of 5900 rpm and the reds use 3ish watts compared to the 6-8watts the hgst are listed as. Also the price difference $20 compared to $100.
One thing though, if you’re not using a backplane you’ll need a special type of breakout cable to connect them to your hba/raid card
actually, I have all that is needed. Am using SAS controller, for SATA drives. Bid on these drives 6 months before, got everything delivered for 304 usd (20 units), shipping included. It’s been sitting in the corner for months since can’t reconcile the fact that it doesn’t power down, and the possibly 3 watts may become 6 watts constant power per drive. Plan to deply 10 drives.
FWIW most of us don’t power down our SATA drives either. If you’re using unraid, you can deploy exactly as many as you need and add more as you go along.
Yeah, I guess I get spoiled with Unraid as it powers down the sata drives on it’s own. I’ve decided, no point wasting these drives :D. Will go with migration, will get all the 2TB and some 1 TB out and replace with all 3TB
Unraid’s default behavior is to not spin the drives down, actually.
I see.
I have [Chenbro NR12000 1U 1x 8m QUAD CORE E3-1230v2 3.3GHz 32GB RAM NO HDD]. Do I still need the LSI SAS controller and the cable?
You don’t need a LSI SAS controller unless you are using more than 8 drives. Your board already has one onboard.
Seagate’s enterprise line of SATA and SAS drives are on a different level than their consumer ones. I have several Seagate SAS2 drives that have like 7+ years of runtime on them going strong.
Hmmm are the refurb HGSTs worth grabbing? Just wondering about drive hours, etc or are they just brand new basically rehabbed?
I got these. How do I connect these to chenbro. The ports on these are completely different? What cables do I need? Thanks
My 3 HGST 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drives each had ~52,000 hours.
I recommend you move the chenbro outside of the chassis, into a desktop tower as detailed in the guide.
Yes I did buy a recommended cmp tower however how do I connect the sas2 drives? Will these help? Appreciate if you guide me to any other connectors I need to buy.
Would a similar deal be available for the larger enterprise drives?
Working on it…
Please let me know if anyone can help. Thanks
I am no expert, but hopefully I can help you out a little bit.
After some quick research, it looks like the cables that you mention are the correct drive cable for that motherboard.
First some info about your motherboard in case you need it, if you already know this feel free to skip ahead, lol. That motherboard has 2 groups of SATA drive ports. There is one group of 6 SATA ports that is for connecting SATA drives (from the pictures this group will have a couple of blue ports and the other 4 ports are black), the second group of SATA ports are near the first group and consists of 8 SATA ports (all black) to be used with the onboard SAS controller (these are the ports that you want to connect your SAS drives to).
To connect your drives you want to attach the small (SATA) end of the drive cable to one of the 8 ports that I mentioned above. Connecting the wider SAS end of the cable is a two step process (I don’t think it matters what order you do the steps in, do it in whatever order is easiest for you)
STEP 1: Connect the wider SAS end of the drive cable to the SAS drive.
STEP 2: Connect a SATA power cable to the power side of the wide end of the drive cable.
After that your drive should be all connected and ready to go. Now, just repeat the process for any other SAS drives that you need to connect. I believe that I have all the information and details correct (if I have something wrong, someone please correct me). Also, I think this is clear enough to be easily understood but if it isn’t let me know and I will give it another try, lol.
I hope that it helps.