Recommended controllers for Unraid


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I don't think you can expect more than 6 SATA ports on a x1 PCIE without some kind of port multiplier. So 10 or 20 is taking a big risk on transfer speed and dropped connections.

 

5 hours ago, klor said:

I need 6 disks

Your motherboard already have 6 SATA ports, do you mean 6 additional disks ?

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56 minutes ago, ChatNoir said:

I don't think you can expect more than 6 SATA ports on a x1 PCIE without some kind of port multiplier. So 10 or 20 is taking a big risk on transfer speed and dropped connections.

This is the reason, why I plan to buy PCI-E X4 version. Over PCI-E 2.0 X4 has 2000 MB/s of bandwidth available, so it will give  plenty of transfer speed.

I plan to connect all 8 drives to the PCI-E SATA card.

 

On motherboard SATA a system drive and a DVD writer is attached.

 

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Does depend on what drives you're hooking up and how many you intend to use at once. Most normal spinning sata drives less than 180MB/s & unlikely to be reading that from 6 drives at once. 

Sata SSD's could be up to 600MB/s each so would eat up the bandwidth.

 

But using on x1 will become more of an issue once ZFS is implemented.

Edited by dopeytree
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4x traditional sata drives (not SSD!!) would be acceptable on PCIe gen3 x1 because 900MB/s ÷ 4 = 225MB/s which is on par with the fastest spinning drives.

 

I'm running 3x traditional sata's & 1x sata SSD and seems ok so far. The SSD is part of a mirror cache pool with the other half connected to motherboard.

 

494950318_Screenshot2022-10-03at19_19_12.png.d93df300ade39e837f8673e8001bc475.png

 

https://www.fullexposure.photography/how-fast-is-pcie-4-0-nvme-vs-pcie-3-0/#:~:text=But the biggest benefit of,(31.52 Gb%2Fs).

Edited by dopeytree
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Is any of the following cards using sata port multiplier? 

 

PCI-E Sata Adapter 4X PCIE Sata PCI Express Expansion Card with 10 Ports PCIE3.0 (using ASM1166+JMB585 chipset):

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mOKtbzq

 

Another nominate card could be this one:

PCIE SATA Card SATA 3.0 PCIe Card, PCIe To SATA Controller Expansion Card with 16 Ports (using ASM1064 x 4 chipset):

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mK9YdS0

 

There said, cards with sata port multiplier should be avoided. 

Is there any specific reason? 

Perhaps because of the bandwidth? 

Edited by klor
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On 10/3/2022 at 7:49 AM, ChatNoir said:

Your motherboard already have 6 SATA ports, do you mean 6 additional disks ?

Yes, but I plan to hang all disks on the same card. Should work all disks, or nothing. Just imagine the situation, that 6 disk are attached to the SATA xard, 2 to the motherboard SATA. If the card is broken, then suddenly 6 disks will be missing, 2 will be still available, which will result unwanted situation.

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6 hours ago, trurl said:

Parity checks and disk rebuilds require simultaneous access of all disks so multiplier will slow things down a lot.

I understand. 

So SATA multiplier affects performance, when parity checks and disk rebuilds are done.Thanks! 

 

I'm thinking, if my mentioned cards are using SATA multiplier or not. 

PCI-E 4X 10 Port SATA Card with PCIE3.0 (using ASM1166+JMB585 chipset):

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mOKtbzq

ASM1166 chipset supports 6 SATA disks:

https://www.asmedia.com.tw/product/45aYq54sP8Qh7WH8/58dYQ8bxZ4UR9wG5

 

JMB585 chipset supports 5 SATA disks:

https://www.jmicron.com/products/list/15

 

So I suppose this card supports natively 10 SATA ports without multiplier.

Am I right? 

 

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Just future proofing...  is there any LSI card that would make use of a 16x slot for bandwidth?

 

If you factor in below it would give 4GB/s on gen1 x16 so 500MB/s if we go for a 8port sas card. If not then x8 would dish out speed to cope with spinning drives but not 8x SSDs.

 

I ask because on many motherboards when using the 2nd m.2 slot the gen3 x16 card becomes a gen1 x16 card and the 2nd m2 becomes a gen2 instead of gen3.

The gen4 x16 slot has a graphics card in.

 

329321498_Screenshot2022-10-07at21_24_49.thumb.png.8dec7e99f9bb1be05adbcac03b6476c8.png

Edited by dopeytree
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On 10/7/2022 at 10:30 AM, JorgeB said:

An LSI 9211-8i or similar, they can be found pretty cheap used on ebay.

I did read, that LSI cards are getting very hot and needs additional cooling, because the attached factory heatsink is not enough. 

 

What is the experience? 

Does it cause problems, if only the original heatsink is used? 

 

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