March 30, 201115 yr I'm hesitating between a supermicro controller or this intel. Supports up to 14 drives and only 110 €. Anyone experience with this controller ?
March 30, 201115 yr Here is a tip I learned the hard way... only buy something for the unRAID server if it is on the list of approved devices. If the Intel card is on the list, go for it, otherwise save yourself the hassle and go with the SuperMicro since it is a known quantity.
March 30, 201115 yr I'm hesitating between a supermicro controller or this intel. Supports up to 14 drives and only 110 €. Anyone experience with this controller ? This is a very interesting option - and am seeing it for the first time. 14 drives on a 4x controller would be an excellent option for many users. LSI makes the processor on the card, which is the same vendor that makes the BR10i discussed at length in another thread in this forum. Only negative on the BR10i is it does not support 3T drives at this point. Newer LSI controllers DO support 3T, so I don't know if this controller would or wouldn't support them. The BR10i requires the 5.0b6a version. There are a couple loose ends related to spindown that should be fixed in the next beta, but there are simple workarounds. I have a BR10i and would recommend except for the drive size issue. The only way new hardware gets supported here us for someone to take the step and buy a controller and try it. Tom is usually supportive of requests to add new drivers for new controllers - especially if that support would provide value to a large spectrum of users. If you bought one of these and helped test it out and report issues to Tom, it would be a big help to the community IMO. First steps, though, would be to determine if the controller supports 3T drives and if the driver in the 5.0 betas supports this card's chipset. You might want to reach out to BRiT as he did much of the legwork on the BR10i.
March 30, 201115 yr Interesting option... would love to find out how well it works. 14 drives on a single card would make it fairly easy to get to 20 drives with most boards, even getting to 22 would be fairly straight forward.
March 30, 201115 yr Looking up SASWT4I all I found was a 4 port card. http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/prodbrief/RAID_SASWT4I_prodbrief.pdf
March 30, 201115 yr Scalability Supports up to 122 physical devices in SAS mode which is ideal for employing JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Disks) or up to 14 devices in RAID 0, 1, 1E/10E mode through direct connect device attachment or through expander backplane support. so 4 ports on the card and expandable to 122 with expanders / port multipliers
March 30, 201115 yr It should work under 5.0b6a as it uses the mptsas driver included in that release. You will most likely have the spin control issues but basic functionality and temp reporting should be fine. Regards, Peter
March 30, 201115 yr Scalability Supports up to 122 physical devices in SAS mode which is ideal for employing JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Disks) or up to 14 devices in RAID 0, 1, 1E/10E mode through direct connect device attachment or through expander backplane support. so 4 ports on the card and expandable to 122 with expanders / port multipliers Do you mean like these? http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/AD5HPMSXA.asp or http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm-e.asp Ok, how many drives on a port multiplier can 1 lane support without slowing down? I guess if the 4 ports share the 4 lanes then as long as they aren't all reading at once it would be fast enough.
March 30, 201115 yr I just looked at the PDF specs and agree - this is a 4 port SATA card. To answer the OP, this is not comparable with the SASLP.
March 30, 201115 yr Author Ok my mistake then: I thought when I read the specs "up to 14 drives in raid mode through direct connect" I thought it could handle 14 drives.
March 30, 201115 yr This is the little brother of any LSI1068E based card (including the popular but still not 100% supporter BR10I). I believe the chip is the same LSI1068E (but marked as 1064E) or a half good 1068E again marked as 1064E. And they use only four PCIe lanes thus requiring PCIe x4 slot The other difference is they decided to use four regular SATA connectors instead of the single SFF8087 and thus avoiding the need for relatively expensive SATA breakout cables. At 110 € it is very expensive IMHO (considering that you can buy 1068E based cards for $50 or less off EBay plus two breakout cables for $10-12 each and have twice as many ports.
March 31, 201115 yr There are Adaptec cards which support up to 24 internal drives (plus four external) on an 8-lane PCIe, although rather expensive. I have no idea whether unRAID does, or could, support any of these cards. Adaptec 28 port card
March 31, 201115 yr There are Adaptec cards which support up to 24 internal drives (plus four external) on an 8-lane PCIe, although rather expensive. I have no idea whether unRAID does, or could, support any of these cards. Adaptec 28 port card That thing is obscenely expensive at $1600! How about this one. Still pricey at $500, but I could see some users willing to spend the premium to avoid a motherboard / processor / memory upgrade and be able to add 8 more drives. LSI 9201 (I am 99% sure these drives will go to 3T, although it appears LSI is somewhat notorious for programming their BIOS to not support larger drives than are available at time of release, so users are forced to upgrade to support larger drives.)
March 31, 201115 yr Scalability Supports up to 122 physical devices in SAS mode which is ideal for employing JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Disks) or up to 14 devices in RAID 0, 1, 1E/10E mode through direct connect device attachment or through expander backplane support. so 4 ports on the card and expandable to 122 with expanders / port multipliers Do you mean like these? http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/AD5HPMSXA.asp or http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm-e.asp Ok, how many drives on a port multiplier can 1 lane support without slowing down? I guess if the 4 ports share the 4 lanes then as long as they aren't all reading at once it would be fast enough. Yeah these are the commercial available cheap once ... Hp has portmulitplier cards that are going to much more ports but of course $$ http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13232_na/13232_na.pdf the br10i has same capabilities ... one BR10 i and a card like this will get you 28 extra ports see this article -> http://www.storageforum.net/forum/showthread.php?t=8012 no clue what the speed will go to .... but according the article is it keeping 2.4gbs of course you need x4 pcie slots even the AOC-SASLP-MV8 can use the expander card... so normally only one controller needed and a expander like this ... might save headache for people having difficulties for the mobo to recognize the second raid controller ... anyway no clue what these puppies cost and if unraid even works with them ...
March 31, 201115 yr How about this one. Still pricey at $500, but I could see some users willing to spend the premium to avoid a motherboard / processor / memory upgrade and be able to add 8 more drives. LSI 9201 It's interesting to note that the price at LSI's own online shop is only $475, here!
April 1, 201115 yr When I hear port multiplier I think of several drives sharing a single connection instead of 1 connection per drive. That can only lead to slowdowns.
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