Frank1940 Posted April 11, 2018 Share Posted April 11, 2018 26 minutes ago, NasOnABudget said: Seems this hasnt been updated for a while, any recommendations for new cheap 4 port cards? Im just window shopping together a build to get an idea of what a full setup would cost. I would not be looking at the cheap 4-port cards. Most of them are based on the Marvell chip set and some users have had problems with them. The basic recommendation today is to go with the LSI cards. Many are getting them new and used from E-Bay. You can get an eight port card beginning at $50US that may require crossflashing or you could buy a ready-to-use card beginning at $70US. (As with all E-Bay purchases carefully vet your choice of vendor. I, personally, would avoid the China based vendors and get one from a vendor in my country.) You may only need four ports now but you will be getting the extra ports at a very small price per port. IF you do go with the cheap four port card, go with one that has a large heatsink on it. Most folks tend to use these cards to give a few more SATA ports in their PC's and only have one drive active at a time. unRAID, on the other hand, has long periods when every drive on the system will be running. All SATA chip sets run HOT and cooling can be a real problem! Link to comment
NasOnABudget Posted April 11, 2018 Share Posted April 11, 2018 Just now, Frank1940 said: I would not be looking at the cheap 4-port cards. Most of them are based on the Marvell chip set and some users have had problems with them. The basic recommendation today is to go with the LSI cards. Many are getting them new and used from E-Bay. You can get an eight port card beginning at $50US that may require crossflashing or you could buy a ready-to-use card beginning at $70US. (As with all E-Bay purchases carefully vet your choice of vendor. I, personally, would avoid the China based vendors and get one from a vendor in my country.) You may only need four ports now but you will be getting the extra ports at a very small price per port. IF you do go with the cheap four port card, go with one that has a large heatsink on it. Most folks tend to use these cards to give a few more SATA ports in their PC's and only have one drive active at a time. unRAID, on the other hand, has long periods when every drive on the system will be running. All SATA chip sets run HOT and cooling can be a real problem! Im really put off by the idea of buying second hand computer components, so thatd break the budget. Heres what ive come up with so far (really just roughly evaluating options). with the idea of dumping my currently large assortment of backup lacking jbod drives (5 drives amounting to ~15 tb) into it, by adding 2 8tb drives, keeping 4 out of 5 drives from before, and having at least one drive for parity until I can get a full proper backup system sorted out. I guess I should probably make a post about this somewhere so Il probably do that as well, but I just wanted to point out my usecase/budget to give some insight into why Im looking for what Im looking for. Link to comment
Frank1940 Posted April 11, 2018 Share Posted April 11, 2018 10 minutes ago, NasOnABudget said: Im really put off by the idea of buying second hand computer components, so thatd break the budget I can only tell you that I have seen more posted problems with the Marvell-based SATA cards then I have seen from using a used LSI card... Link to comment
jeffreywhunter Posted April 11, 2018 Share Posted April 11, 2018 25 minutes ago, Frank1940 said: I can only tell you that I have seen more posted problems with the Marvell-based SATA cards then I have seen from using a used LSI card... I'll confirm Frank1940's point. Once UR 6.2 'ish' I started having problems with my Marvell Based AOC SAS2LPMV-8 adapters. When I went to the LSI card the problems went away... Link to comment
pwm Posted April 11, 2018 Share Posted April 11, 2018 You have to be careful when buying CPU, RAM etc from soneone who is likely to have overclocked and overvolted and so significantly affected the total lifetime expectancy of the component. If you buy traditional server-grade controller cards, you don't need to worry about his kind of issues. The MTBF for electronics that hasn't been run out-of-spec is way longer than the expected economical lifetime. The probability of problems can potentially be lower, because someone else have run the component past the early death interval of the bathtub curve. So just make sure they seem to understand normal ESD practices. Link to comment
Frank1940 Posted April 11, 2018 Share Posted April 11, 2018 (edited) Plus, many of these are cards that were removed when big server complexes (or farms) with capacity issues were replaced with bigger, faster equipment using larger hard drives and faster CPU's and more memory. Much of the old gear was sold and some of it was savaged for parts. Many of these servers were built by companies like IBM, Hp and Dell. These are the used parts that you are looking at. The important point is that the gear being sold is not on the market because it worn out (or was giving operational problems) but because it was obsolete to do the current job required of it. Edited April 11, 2018 by Frank1940 Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted April 11, 2018 Share Posted April 11, 2018 A lot of times, the gear isn't even obsoleted, it's just reached a certain service age and the company has a policy to replace hardware of a certain age. At work, every PC get's replaced within 3 years even though most people here would agree that for light duty use a PC has a decent service life well over 3 years. The corporate IT won't even let an older PC stay even when the OS is up to date and it is only used for the simple remedial task of running label making software. Link to comment
BobPhoenix Posted April 11, 2018 Share Posted April 11, 2018 I've never gotten a bad LSI based (IBM M1015 and Dell Perc H310 actually) card when I made sure it was a used server pull from the USA. Didn't want to tempt fate and get a NEW one from China. Link to comment
pwm Posted April 13, 2018 Share Posted April 13, 2018 (edited) On 4/11/2018 at 4:40 PM, Frank1940 said: The important point is that the gear being sold is not on the market because it worn out (or was giving operational problems) but because it was obsolete to do the current job required of it. The card itself might be reusable but if the motherboard/CPU is obsolete they replace everything because that's the only way they get warranty. It's just very practical to replace everything as soon as the complete system as a whole has passed the economical lifetime. Edited April 13, 2018 by pwm Link to comment
Frank1940 Posted April 13, 2018 Share Posted April 13, 2018 29 minutes ago, pwm said: The card itself might be reusable but if the motherboard/CPU is obsolete they replace everything because that's the only way they get warranty. It's just very practical to replace everything as soon as the complete system as a whole has passed the economical lifetime. And don't forget the size of the disks. If all of the servers in a section were equipped with 2TB disks when 10TB driveshave gone main stream and lack of storage space is becoming an issue, replacement of all the servers in a section of data center would make sense. It would also seem that when doing an upgrading on a massive scale, that it makes sense that the replacements be reconfigured and tested before placing them in service. Think about another factor, the cost of those two or three SATA cards are small change when you consider that some servers now have SIXTY hard drives in them! Here is a link to the Backblaze for their most recent server build: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/ Note that they have even provide their cost analysis! You can buy one of these for a modest $12,849.40 (less hard drives)! Link to comment
tucansam Posted April 13, 2018 Share Posted April 13, 2018 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0747QWNR6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 For anyone interested, this is probably the best cheap upgrade I have made to my server in a decade. It places a fan directly over the heatsink of my LSI 16-port card. Link to comment
SimonAG Posted April 14, 2018 Share Posted April 14, 2018 (edited) Is the SAS2308 controller chipset confirmed working OK? I don't see it on the recommended controllers list in the wiki? I was wanting to buy the but Silverstone SST-ECS02 scan.co.uk don't have that one in stock. They do have the SilverStone ECS04 in stock and looking at Silverstone website the ECS04 has a higher spec and is the same price as ecs02. It does come with a different controller than the ecs02 and I noticed most of the recommended controllers on the wiki have that LSISAS2008 controller, the ecs04 has LSISAS2308 controller. I did search the forum but didn't find a thread specifically recommended SAS2308 . Edited April 14, 2018 by Simontv Link to comment
ken-ji Posted April 14, 2018 Share Posted April 14, 2018 Hmm.. I've been happily using SAS2308 based card since day one. lspci 03:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2308 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 (rev 05) 05:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2308 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 (rev 05) My particular card is the LSI 9206-16e (and I'm still happily on FW 17) Link to comment
tucansam Posted April 14, 2018 Share Posted April 14, 2018 7 hours ago, Simontv said: Is the SAS2308 controller chipset confirmed working OK? I don't see it on the recommended controllers list in the wiki? I was wanting to buy the but Silverstone SST-ECS02 scan.co.uk don't have that one in stock. They do have the SilverStone ECS04 in stock and looking at Silverstone website the ECS04 has a higher spec and is the same price as ecs02. It does come with a different controller than the ecs02 and I noticed most of the recommended controllers on the wiki have that LSISAS2008 controller, the ecs04 has LSISAS2308 controller. I did search the forum but didn't find a thread specifically recommended SAS2308 . I love my Silverstone cases. They make great stuff. Having said that, the controller you referenced above looks like the Chinese knockoff LSI I got on ebay last year. It won't do more than 20MB/s no matter what I do. And there was speculation that, if its firmware isn't 100%, it might lead to data corruption. I'm not knocking Silverstone, maybe they contracted with the same plant that builds them for LSI. Or maybe not. Link to comment
Squid Posted April 14, 2018 Share Posted April 14, 2018 2 hours ago, tucansam said: I'm not knocking Silverstone, maybe they contracted with the same plant that builds them for LSI If ever in doubt about a LSI/Avagio card, contact them. They are more than happy to let you know if the card is counterfeit or not. While I would never personally buy a LSI card via ebay being shipped from China, I did however take a leap and buy a card via Newegg for $25 new that was 100% legit according to LSI Link to comment
tucansam Posted April 15, 2018 Share Posted April 15, 2018 Indeed. Sending the serial number to LSI (Broadcomm now I think) is how I confirmed it was counterfeit. Link to comment
coblck Posted May 9, 2018 Share Posted May 9, 2018 Hi needing to expand as have used all my ports would this work out the box plug and play SATA CARD Any recommendations appreciated has to be able to order from UK Link to comment
JorgeB Posted May 9, 2018 Share Posted May 9, 2018 4 minutes ago, coblck said: would this work out the box plug and play Yes. Link to comment
TimSmall Posted May 10, 2018 Share Posted May 10, 2018 (edited) 16 hours ago, coblck said: Hi needing to expand as have used all my ports would this work out the box plug and play SATA CARD Any recommendations appreciated has to be able to order from UK I've found these (IOCrest/Syba SY-PEX40039 - asm1061 chipset AHCI) to be reliable - on par with the Silicon Image 3132, and better than the Marvell cards (I've had various reliability problems with Marvell-based cards - which appear to have been down to bugs in the chip implementations). You can also get no-name cards using the same chip for about half that price (avoid the ones with eSATA ports and internal SATA ports on them). e.g. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/323172773980 (but I've not tried these, only the IOCrest branded ones). Edited May 10, 2018 by TimSmall Link to comment
Frank1940 Posted May 10, 2018 Share Posted May 10, 2018 3 hours ago, TimSmall said: I've found these (IOCrest/Syba SY-PEX40039 - asm1061 chipset AHCI) to be reliable - on par with the Silicon Image 3132, and better than the Marvell cards (I've had various reliability problems with Marvell-based cards - which appear to have been down to bugs in the chip implementations). I have had these cards fail. unRAID will use all of the ports at one time for hours on end while it is doing virtually any operation which involves using parity. Most of the time, these heat sinks in these cards are marginal for that type of use. In fact, the no-name card that you reference does not even have a heat sink on it! That device may work fine for adding a SATA port for occasional use in a backup disk in a home but I would not want to commit a server to such a device. In fact, many people will not use many of the new "LSI" cards that are being sold by Chinese sources. I realize that many folks are on a budget but you do have to apply a bit of prudence when buying a controller. They have to be reliable as they put your data at risk. (The SATA card that failed threw-up hundreds of errors including one that made one the SMART attributes on the the disk being precleared was "Failing now"! If you must buy one of these cards, buy the one with the biggest heat sink on it that you can find. There is a reason why the LSI has that massive heat sink on it! Link to comment
coblck Posted May 10, 2018 Share Posted May 10, 2018 Hi thanks for all the feedback, ive googled your lsi 9211 card and it says 8 ports but only see two i take it you can get cables to convert to sata, also i take it it plugs and plays with unraid OS Link to comment
Frank1940 Posted May 10, 2018 Share Posted May 10, 2018 1 minute ago, coblck said: Hi thanks for all the feedback, ive googled your lsi 9211 card and it says 8 ports but only see two i take it you can get cables to convert to sata, also i take it it plugs and plays with unraid It requires a "Mini SAS Male SFF-8087 36Pin to 4 SATA 7Pin female forward breakout cable" For four drives, one cable, two cables for eight drives. I recommend getting .5m cables rather the 1m cables unless you absolutely require long cables. I also suggest that you get them without metal latches on them if you are plugging directly into an Drive. For reason, see here: https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=10477 While the article is by WD, I suspect the WD did not make the change on a whim and other manufacturers may have done it for the same reason. Link to comment
coblck Posted May 10, 2018 Share Posted May 10, 2018 Ok Frank1940 thanks for your reply's and help will look into them, i take it unraid just sees the drives independently as if they were plugged into motherboard Link to comment
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