I am not a fan of this. I see it all the time at work and it’s very obvious when someone has chatGPT write an email for them (it’s always such a sterile and yet overcomplicated writing style). If it’s a direct email to me, I tend to feel insulted that they couldn’t be bothered to write those 4 paragraphs themselves - it would have taken them 2 mins. There is a definite human disconnect going on in society at the moment, and its worrying.

I honestly don’t know what would happen, but I wouldn’t try it. Hard disks are sensitive things.

The HBA can definitely handle hot swapping, but I’m pretty sure you need a backplane for it to work. If I remember correctly, it needs the capacitors on the backplane’s PCB to allow for the power drain. I’m not sure those cables alone will do.

I have this HBA in my homelab server and was surprised to find it has two SAS controller in it. I can’t remember exactly what I had to do to flash it, but I needed to flash both controllers using an EFI prompt so they became one controller. It took an afternoon of research, but I eventually flashed both of them to IT mode and it worked as expected. I’m pretty sure this thread helped me at the time:

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/original-lsi-sas-9300-16i-problem-flashing-please-help.36618/

Good luck!

I’ve been using a Zidoo Z9X for streaming local media. Not cheap, but very powerful and has a huge amount of features. It’ll play just about anything you throw at it, all locally.

https://www.zidoo.tv/Product/index/model/Z9X/target/VEMg6VRC2%2B9KKmVViAFMcQ%3D%3D.html

Yep. When I first set up my instance, I couldn’t believe how slow it was. I set up redis using the Nextcloud documentation and its like butter now.