Computer nerd question!

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

The computer it is going into has two 1TB SSD drives and 64 Gig of RAM and a fast next gen CPU in the full size tower. It has room for many drives, It ain't no laptop, even for Andre the Giant.

Ensure the power supply is up to it. And fans. Definitely stagger power-up. Why I still love the old Dell Precision full-size workstations like the T7500; 4 front-accessible 5.25" bays, 4 internal 3.5", 1000w power supply, many fans.

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

My goal was to add hard drives as we needed them for temporary storage of files. A single client folder can be over 1 TB of just data. We most the important parts to our RAID after the project is done, and paid for and no more changes likely.

I despise both Windows and hardware RAID, but you likely have no better alternative. Other than an enclosure that does RAID that also has some DAS facility - e.g. eSATA. Which I would have thought would be ideal. But, literally, the choices are almost endless. And your criteria/preferences are going to be very different from mine.

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

The goal now is to find a PCI card that will plug into the motherboard, and allow me to add the SAS drives as a simple data drive, only fast.

Yeh, they won't be "fast". If you want "fast", SSDs are available in sizes up to 16T now. But these aren't cheap.

[GH85Carrera]

The power supply was overkill for the computer with the way it was first built. It was all designed and built me, and the PS is up to it, and it has several fans with room for more fans.