Ok, doing the final purchase analysis as usual, the process was:

  • Initial price on Amazon
  • Check price on Newegg
  • Check similar prices through rewards portals (BoA) to Rakutan, Overstock as these guys have better prices usually. See what the rebates are on with cashbackmonitor.com and what coupons are with slick deals.com
  • Google search looking for other sites not otherwise covered

Here were the final purchase locations (as of today, this will constantly shift):

Part Source Price
4 x Seagate Enterprise Capacity v.4 TigerDirect.com $317
Xeon 2920 v3 Rakuten $434
Supermicro X10SRH-CLH4F-0 Provantage $400
2 x Crucial 16GB DDR4 Provantage $199
SeaSonic XM-1050 Newegg $169
Norco RPC-4220 Newegg $329
Norco RL-26 Newegg $50
1 x SAS SFF-8087 to SATA reverse breakout Newegg $30
2 x SAS SFF-8643 to SFF-8087 Superwarehouse $35
Norco 120mm Fan Partition Amazon $20
Prolimatech Genesis Newegg $72

Total is $3192 which is pretty pricey until you remember that we have the chassis for $1000 worth of disk. And the Synology was $1K for 12 drives and not nearly as powerful (Atom vs Hexacore Xeon!).
As an aside, the SAS folks have a huge variety of cables. The most common are eSATA like cables for single drives and then there is the 8087 which is small four drive connector used in modern SAS backplanes like the 4220. Then there is the SFF-8087 that then breakout in the “reverse” direction (toward the motherboard) into four SATA connectors. This let’s you drive SATA drives with an SAS backplane.

I’m Rich & Co.

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