I filed my tax return and chose to be a man child.
I have been feeling constrained on my NAS because I simply don't have any expandability in terms of open drive bays if I want to expand, or replace one of the arrays. When I last expanded the FreeNAS server from 16TB to 32TB, I was forced to build an entirely separate system, then transfer data between them over a Gigabit Ethernet wire. Which sadly only transferred at barely 30MB/s.
It took over 5 days straight to move the data.
So, I've decided to fix that with the Tax return since I actually paid off the credit cards, and only have the Focus RS loan right now.
One, 24bay hot-swap SAS/SATA Norco server case. The Server case has 6 back-planes, so I need 6 SAS ports to have full functionality. I also bought Noctua silent fans to replace all the OEM fans with ultra-silent fans.
One LSI SAS 9201-16i internal SAS/SATA card supporting 16 drives @ full speed, but up to 512 drives with a SAS expander. Its older, but for regular spinny drives will have enough I/O to support the arrays. SSD's could be problematic, but I have the internal SATA3 ports for those.
But that only has 4 ports, and I need 6. So I ordered an additional LSI SAS9211-8i card. I will have to cross-flash it to make it compatible, but there is plenty of info on how to do it.
I also got all the required cables.
So, this will let me install my new 32TB array in the case, along with my old 16TB array. And will still leave 14 bays open for more hard drives in the future. So it will be easy and fast to migrate from an old array to a new one.