Thanks! I stumbled across this post and thought the controller model numbers sounded familiar, but from 3Ware not Broadcom. So I googled a bit and learned that 3Ware was acquired by Broadcom (via LSI).
I still have a few older 3Ware cards that I haven't used in over five years. IMHO they were (and maybe still are) the best hardware RAID solution available, and Linux support was always great.
Hehe, the signal integrity stuff can really bite if using those cheap USB3.0 extenders.
Glad to see that the forcimg the link from PCIe 2.0 to PCIe 1.0 made it far more reliable.
Before you buy a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and connect it to sixty 20TB hard drives, try this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxmjy1nz6MM
It is not as exciting, but you may actually be able to find and afford the parts. .
I'm pretty sure this is only meant as a tech demo; the "Future Plans" section calls out that the author doesn't actually have enough files to really use that much storage, and the whole thing sounds like "hey, how much storage can you attach to this little thing?"
You're right that the Raspberry Pi has become so difficult to find now that I am playing with Teensys again. Probably should experiment with the Raspberry Pi Pico.
And not only that, Broadcom is now a subsidiary of Avago!
It seems like in networking, AI, and storage, it's buyouts all the way down these days.