I’ve purchased more hard drives for my homeserver/homelab (4 x 4 TB HGST drives), but completely forgot that the 2U rackmount case I currently have doesn’t have any more space for drives. There are plenty of internal ports left to connect the drives, but all the physical slots are full.
I’ve begun looking into cases for holding hard drives and providing power, with the intention of simply using a long HD MiniSAS-to-SATA cable to snake out of my host and into the drive tower/enclosure. It’s definitely going to be ugly, but fortunately it won’t be hurting anyone except myself.
I promise to buy some proper adapters and external cables later! I’m just trying to spread the cost of things out over time.