bobbintb Posted March 6, 2021 Share Posted March 6, 2021 (edited) I'm upgrading hardware. My old mobo has about 20 SATA ports. My new one has 8 but a few extra M.2 slots and some PCIe slots. I'd rather use the extra M.2 ports, and as few of them as possible. I was thinking of this: https://www.amazon.com/Internal-Non-Raid-Adapter-Desktop-Support/dp/B07T3RMFFT but I would need 2. My mobo uses PCIe 4.0 but I don't think there is anything out there for that yet (my thinking being more bandwidth, more ports, fewer slots taken). I was also looking at using SAS to breakout to SATA but I know little about SAS and haven't had any experience with it. This is my new mobo: https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/TRX40-DESIGNARE-rev-10#kf Basically, I need about 10 more SATA ports but I want to occupy as few slots as possible, and preferably use the M.2 slots instead of PCIe. Everything I have looked as so far only offers about 4 or 5 SATA ports. Any suggestions? Edited March 6, 2021 by bobbintb Quote Link to comment
Vr2Io Posted March 6, 2021 Share Posted March 6, 2021 If you can accept use two M.2 slot and ten SATA cable then fine. SAS + Expander still the best, it support many device, easy cabling and have great flexibility, but expensive. Quote Link to comment
bobbintb Posted March 6, 2021 Author Share Posted March 6, 2021 3 minutes ago, Vr2Io said: If you can accept use two M.2 slot and ten SATA cable then fine. SAS + Expander still the best, it support many device, easy cabling and have great flexibility, but expensive. But even with SAS + expander, I can only breakout to 4x SATA. I would need 2 to get 8x SATA and not 10. Any cards that give more? Quote Link to comment
Vr2Io Posted March 6, 2021 Share Posted March 6, 2021 (edited) 29 minutes ago, bobbintb said: But even with SAS + expander, I can only breakout to 4x SATA. I would need 2 to get 8x SATA and not 10. Any cards that give more? Some HBA have 16 or 24 port in one card, but crazy expensive. Solution was use cheap 8 port HBA with cheap 16 port expander for 16 disks. ( One SAS socket support 4 disks ) For example Edited March 6, 2021 by Vr2Io Quote Link to comment
bobbintb Posted March 7, 2021 Author Share Posted March 7, 2021 (edited) 7 hours ago, Vr2Io said: Some HBA have 16 or 24 port in one card, but crazy expensive. Solution was use cheap 8 port HBA with cheap 16 port expander for 16 disks. ( One SAS socket support 4 disks ) For example Those all seem to be PCIe 2.0 as well, which would be a pretty big limitations. edit: I also just realized the M.2 card I listed uses only 2 lanes, so it's already bottlenecked, unfortunately. Edited March 7, 2021 by bobbintb Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted March 7, 2021 Share Posted March 7, 2021 8 hours ago, bobbintb said: only 2 lanes, so it's already bottlenecked, Unless you're going to use them with SSDs there's enough bandwidth, see here: Quote Link to comment
bobbintb Posted March 7, 2021 Author Share Posted March 7, 2021 10 hours ago, JorgeB said: Unless you're going to use them with SSDs there's enough bandwidth, see here: That's a good point. I was thinking so much about the theoretical bandwidth I didn't even consider my existing drives aren't even going to get anywhere near that anyway. I think at this point I just need to buy somethings and quit overthinking it. Quote Link to comment
Opawesome Posted March 7, 2021 Share Posted March 7, 2021 I personally bought a LSI SAS 9201 16i for about 100 euros on eBay. You can add 16 SATA drives with it. No BIOS/firmware flashing required since it is just a HBA controller and not a RAID controller. Quote Link to comment
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