Dale wrote: > Rich Freeman wrote: >> On Mon, Jun 3, 2024 at 11:17 AM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> When you say HBA. Is this what you mean? >>> >>> https://www.ebay.com/itm/125486868824 >>> >> Yes. Typically they have mini-SAS interfaces, and you can get a >> breakout cable that will attach one of those to 4x SATA ports. >> >> Some things to keep in mind when shopping for HBAs: >> 1. Check for linux compatibility. Not every card has great support. >> 2. Flashing the firmware may require windows, and this may be >> necessary to switch a card between RAID mode and IT mode, the latter >> being what you almost certainly want, and the former being what most >> enterprise admins tend to have them flashed as. IT mode basically >> exposes all the drives that are attached as a bunch of standalone >> drivers, while RAID mode will just expose a limited number of virtual >> interfaces and the card bundles the disks into arrays (and if the card >> dies, good luck ever reading those disks again until you reformat >> them). >> 3. Be aware they often use a ton of power. >> 4. Take note of internal vs external ports. You can get either. They >> need different cables, and if your disks are inside the case having >> the ports on the outside isn't technically a show-stopper but isn't >> exactly convenient. >> 5. Take note of the interface speed and size. The card you linked is >> (I think) an 8x v2 card. PCIe will auto-negotiate down, so if you >> plug that card into your v4 4x slot it will run at v2 4x, which is >> 2GB/s bandwidth. That's half of what it is capable of, but probably >> not a big issue. If you want to plug 16 enterprise SSDs into it then >> you'll definitely hit the PCIe bottleneck, but if you plug 16 consumer >> 7200RPM HDDs into it you're only going to hit 2GB/s under fairly ideal >> circumstances, and with fewer HDDs you couldn't hit it at all. If you >> pay more you'll get a newer PCIe revision, which means more bandwidth >> for a given number of lanes. >> 6. Check for hardware compatibility too. Stuff from 1st parties like >> Dell/etc might be fussy about wanting to be in a Dell server with >> weird firmware interactions with the motherboard. A 3rd party card >> like LSI probably is less of an issue here, but check. >> >> Honestly, part of why I went the distributed filesystem route (Ceph >> these days) is to avoid dealing with this sort of nonsense. Granted, >> now I'm looking to use more NVMe and if you want high capacity NVMe >> that tends to mean U.2, and dealing with bifurcation and PCIe >> switches, and just a different sort of nonsense.... >> > > I've read that LSI is best. I also noticed when looking a good while > back that some Ebay listings said they flashed a card to IT mode. I > wasn't quite sure what that was until I saw the other mode was RAID. I > figured that was the JBOD mode basically. This is used, which is fine, > and pricey. I'm mostly just trying to see if I'm headed down the right > path. There could be cheaper or better. > > https://www.ebay.com/itm/391906134343 > > That says it can support up to 256 devices. Would there be a slot on > the mobo, except for video slot, that it would fit into? Next > question. Cables. What do I search for to get the right cable? It > appears to be a bare card. Are cables standard and the same or depends > on card, brand etc? > > On the ASUS mobo. Is that as good as I'm going to find? I've yet to > find anything better. > > Dale > > :-) :-) >
I did some more digging. It seems that all the LSI SAS cards I found need a PCIe x8 slot. The only slot available is the one intended for video. Even my current rig doesn't have a slot available except for video, which has no built in video at all on that mobo. I'd rather not use it on the new build because I've thought about having another monitor added for desktop use so I would need three ports at least. Sometimes I need to move files around and be able to see file names, sizes, dates and all to know what to move where. Having a second monitor would make that a lot easier. Right now, I tend to switch from one desktop to another. It's time consuming when you have lots of files to sort though one or just a few at a time. The little SATA controllers I currently use tend to only need PCIe x1. That is slower but at least it works. I'm fine with the current speed of the drives even over PCIe x1 and I think v2.0. I would like to have the SAS controller but I'll need to see how things pan out for a while first. If needed, I may use the video slot if I decide not to add another monitor. I'm still in a holding pattern on buying the ASUS mobo. I don't expect to find better. It's just not really what I need other than being newer and faster. More memory too. Rest is a downgrade. Dale :-) :-)
