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.
