Recommended controllers for Unraid


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16 minutes ago, OrdinaryButt said:

Well, in the opening post you do say that you have seen 1164 with x1, and ASM says 1-, 2- (see screenshot) what ever it means.

Yes, but will depend on the implementation, 1164 can support x2, 1064 not.

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1 hour ago, pras1011 said:

For hdds is a controller with a 2.5gb ethernet enough? Or is 5gb better?

I also saw your previous post but I still don't understand the correlation between Ethernet speed and disk controller.

I guess I am not the only one since no one answered you.

 

I am sure there is some thought behind your question, can you provide more details ?

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5Gb is not a standard thing it specific to certain manufacturers and often 10Gb cards can't do 5Gb.

 

Go with what is built into your system so use the 1Gb or 2.5Gb for the main network then if you need fast transfer you can add a 10Gb card to both pcs directly connected to each other and only use when needed as this saves the need for a 10Gb switch (unless you already have one). You could use SFPs with a DAC cable. This is a cheap setup.

 

The main issue though is HD speed and most will never max out a 2.5Gb connection. 

SSD's can max out a 10Gb connection but remember if you copying to a normal unraid array it will be as fast as your slowest drive.

 

You can get round this by building a ZFS pool of spinning disks

Edited by dopeytree
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10 hours ago, OrdinaryButt said:

I get that. Have you seen any tests showing that the ASM1164 is indeed faster than 1064?

I have tested the 1166 with 4 ports in use, which is the same as the 1164.

 

As long as the 1164 comes with an x4 physical slot (x2 electric) it will be faster than the 1064.

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On 1/6/2024 at 1:52 PM, JorgeB said:

I have tested the 1166 with 4 ports in use, which is the same as the 1164.

 

As long as the 1164 comes with an x4 physical slot (x2 electric) it will be faster than the 1064.

Can you please tell me what is the downside of having ASM1166 pcie x1 rather than a full blown pcie x16 LSI card? I fail to understand this

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A LSI card can have 1000 drives attached via a single sas port with the use of SAS expanders (these are built into HBA drive chassis in servers) so the extra bandwidth is useful whereas generally Sata cards seem to top out at 6x ports.

Edited by dopeytree
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4 hours ago, dopeytree said:

A LSI card can have 1000 drives attached via a single sas port with the use of SAS expanders (these are built into HBA drive chassis in servers) so the extra bandwidth is useful whereas generally Sata cards seem to top out at 6x ports.

When you say "bandwidth", do you mean the drive speed connected to the card or do you mean the number of drives connected to the card?

 

If you mean the number of drives, then is that the only drawback with the ASM1166 because I just need 6 ports and not more. I'm wondering if an LSI card has other benefits

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On 1/7/2024 at 4:24 PM, mans_ said:

Can you please tell me what is the downside of having ASM1166 pcie x1 rather than a full blown pcie x16 LSI card? I fail to understand this

I felt like you might be lacking some understanding, so I will explain like I would my kids. Ignore if I felt you wrong.

ASM1166 with PCIe x1 will have a max theoretical bandwidth (limited by PCIe) of 8gigaBIT/s or 1gigaBYTE/s (1000megaBYTE/s). 1000/6 and considering overhead, you will get a maximum speed of 150megaBYTE (this is the measurement unit you typically see when you do file transfers in Windows environment). Modern HDDs can go upwards of 250MB/s, so the x1 PCIe slot will be a bottleneck if you have all 6 drives read/write at max capacity at the same time (parity check for example). With SATA SSD, you will reach that limit with 2 units.
If you would be getting the ASM1166, it better have x4 PCIe (that would be 1000MB/s x4). This will allow you to have up to 6 SATA SSD on that card with no bandwidth limitation at all (provided your motherboard x4 or larger PCIe is electrical x4 or larger; physical dimension of the slot doesn't always guarantee the speed)

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And a x8 slot PCIe 3.0 x8 slot gives 7880MB/s which divided by 150MB = 52 drives so you'd be able to write to 52 drives at 150MB/s at the exact same time. In theory anyway.

 

In practice you never write to the same drives at once BUT you may need to read from them all at once during parity checks.

 

Anyway I would always split up arrays into other pools. Hopefully in the future unraid will allow multiple unraid arrays for if you want say a maximum of 20x drives in any pool.

 

With this level of bandwidth you can do ZFS stuff as all disks are accessed at the same time. I use some 2.5" SSDs this way.

 

Comparatively the unraid array accesses single disks at a time.

Edited by dopeytree
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6 hours ago, dopeytree said:

seem to use multiple 4x ASM1064 chips

Can't say for sure, but they are sold as Chia mining card. So simultaneous drive access and speed is not the top priority from what I remember of the Chia hype.

 

The PCB seems to be architectured around 1 Controller and 3 or 4 port multipliers. (I am being optimistic and using the picture of a board that seems to be using a x4 PCIe gen3, not the ones using only x1).

 

image.png.23f688ee9ab39aa8ff769e5d2532254f.png

 

I could be wrong, of course.

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Yeah they sound a bit shit. How come there is no alternative chips sort of between a these 6port asmedia chips that run on pcie2 & a full blown power-hungry HBA. Don't intel have some sata controllers chips?

 

Is it not possible to use the chips motherboards use? I guess maybe the best thing would be one of those pcie3 x8 or x16 cards that have 4x nvme carrier cards with each using a m.2 - sata adapter.  that would give 4x6 = 24 sata ports. 

 

No idea on how reliable that would be tho & more expensive cost but would likely use less power than HBA. HBA power cost is more in not allowing the cpu any lower than c2 states rather than how much power the HBA uses. This is because no ASPM on HBA cards.

Edited by dopeytree
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7 hours ago, Myriad Studios LDN said:

about needing an expander

Only if you want to use more than 8 devices.

 

7 hours ago, Myriad Studios LDN said:

is it possible to use hdds and nvmes at the same time

Yes, note that you need specific NVMe enabler Broadcom cables to use them.

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8 hours ago, Myriad Studios LDN said:

yes I would like to use more than 8 devices

Then you need a expander or expander backplane. 

 

8 hours ago, Myriad Studios LDN said:

could I also connect nvme to the expander?

Note AFAIK. 

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Hi,

 

I have just bought an ASM1166 card.

 

I plugged it into a windows PC to do the firmware upgrade, however the firmware on the card is 221118-003E-00 which is a higher number than the 211108-0000-00 recommended in this thread.

 

Do I need to change the firmware or not do we think? 
 

Thanks. 

Edited by xreyuk
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15 minutes ago, xreyuk said:

Hi,

 

I have just bought an ASM1166 card.

 

I plugged it into a windows PC to do the firmware upgrade, however the firmware on the card is 221118-003E-00 which is a higher number than the 211108-0000-00 recommended in this thread.

 

Do I need to change the firmware or not do we think? 
 

Thanks. 

I would keep the newer firmware, no reported issues with it. There was another poster called Shonk who also received a card with this newer firmware version. I think his goal was to take a backup of it to provide to the rest of us. Maybe something you want to attempt? 
 

Or can you say where you bought your card?

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34 minutes ago, minority said:

I would keep the newer firmware, no reported issues with it. There was another poster called Shonk who also received a card with this newer firmware version. I think his goal was to take a backup of it to provide to the rest of us. Maybe something you want to attempt? 
 

Or can you say where you bought your card?

I'd have no idea how to pull it if someone could tell me I wouldn't mind. 

 

I bought the card off Amazon UK, it was the MZHOU one everyone else appears to be buying.

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