SATA Controller Cards


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Thank you.

 

Turns out the LSI 9211-8i I bought is fake. Probably why it gives me CRC error all the time on all my drives. No error when connected to motherboard, so it looks like the lsi card is faulty.

 

So I am having a hard time deciding on what to buy. I have an areca 1880i that I cant figure out how to use with unRaid so then I need a new card. No clue on what disk index is and were to find it 🤣

 

There is a second hand Dell H310 being sold not far from me and there is always the option to buy a new 9211 or 9207 off ebay with the risk of it being fake again. Dos it matter which one of these cards I buy to use with Inte Expander RES2SV240?

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2 minutes ago, ProphetSe7en said:

Will the 9207 perform better than the other two since it has pcie-3 over pcie-2?

It will have more bandwidth, the question is if it's needed, depends on how many disks you have on the expander and if using single or dual link, some benchmarks here.

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as far as I can tell the intel card only has one input port?

 

I have all my drives attached to the expander, so a totalt of 8 drives + 4 SSD. Will be adding 2 more drives soon.

 

Edit: Turns out I have no clue on what dual link on the expander is lol

Edited by ProphetSe7en
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  • 3 weeks later...

what are people buying now a days? I am looking for a card doesn't need to be anything special, but preferably cheapish and 8 or 2 4s if needed. My MB has 6 ports which I am using now with 5 drives and another utility drive. Current case has enough expansion for 12 total drives so shouldn't need more than 8 I am thinking in the current setup. 

 

Thanks!

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Current recomendation is to use LSI cards.  The ones you should be looking for are listed here:

 

    https://forums.unraid.net/topic/69018-sata-controller-replacement-question-and-advice/?tab=comments#comment-630097

 

 

You can find most of these for less than $100US on E-bay.  The used cards (particularly, HP and Dell OEM) are prized as the are generally genuine LSI parts.   But they must be crossflashed with the LSI firmware to be in the 'IT Mode'.  New LSI cards can be counterfeit and the seller must be carefully vetted to determine if they are selling genuine LSI cards.  (Cheaper is not the way to go if you want to avoid getting a counterfeit card.  The Real Deal is going to cost a bit more...)     

Edited by Frank1940
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  • 1 month later...
2 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

This one should work with the standard AHCI driver, though usually don't work very well because of the port multipliers.

Shame it didn't. Could see it in the lspci list but none of the six drives I attached were recognized. The poor performance was exactly what I was looking for which I eventually found in the Rivo card and it's x1 interface. Something on the range of 76% slower with all 4 drives reading vs single drives.

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  • 3 months later...
21 minutes ago, Spies said:

Could anyone tell me what bandwidth you should expect per drive on a h310? Would it be 3gbps per drive?

The H310 is a PCIe 2.0 x8 card.  You can expect a max bandwidth of ~400 MB/s per lane.  That's plenty for any spinning disk.  You should not attach SSDs to it anyway as it does not support TRIM operations.

 

There are lots of tests and benchmarks that show that 3.2 GB/s is the real-world maximum for all lanes (accounting for overhead) despite the higher stated theoretical limit of 500 MB/s per lane.

 

I have an H310 in my server.

Edited by Hoopster
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10 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

The H310 is a PCIe 2.0 x8 card.  You can expect a max bandwidth of ~400 MB/s per lane.  That's plenty for any spinning disk.  You should not attach SSDs to it anyway as it does not support TRIM operations.

 

There are lots of tests and benchmarks that show that 3.2 GB/s is the real-world maximum for all lanes (accounting for overhead) despite the higher stated theoretical limit of 500 MB/s per lane.

 

I have an H310 in my server.

Can I have Port A going from SFF-8087 to SATA and Port B going from sff 8087 to 8482 with no issues?

 

I have 4 SAS drives and 6 SATA drives currently which I need to move into my new server, current server has 6 onboard SATA but new one disables SATA 5 and 6 when an NVME drive is connected.

Edited by Spies
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12 minutes ago, Spies said:

Can I have Port A going from SFF-8087 to SATA and Port B going from sff 8087 to 8482 with no issues?

I'm no expert in that as I have never tried it.  Both of my cables are SFF-8087 to SATA.  However, I don't see how the card would care about what is on the other end of the SFF-8087 connector be it a SATA or SAS drive.  

 

Perhaps someone who has tried a combination of drive connectors on this or any other card can chime in.

 

Perhaps the Dell H310 Data Sheet will be of assistance. It does say it can handle SATA and SAS drives.

Edited by Hoopster
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  • 2 months later...

Hi there.

Actually im using a "Syba SI-PEX40064 4 Port" Controller Card. Working fine... but I need a bigger Card, so 6 or 8 Port Card.

Could anybody recommend me a non-Marvell Controller Card, which I can buy in germany and which is affordable for my Dell T30?

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Look for an LSI basic card.  Their most basic card has eight ports.  Good bargains can be found on E-bay as well as other sources.  Here is a link to the models you should be looking for:

 

     https://forums.unraid.net/topic/69018-sata-controller-replacement-question-and-advice/?tab=comments#comment-630097

 

When shopping on E-bay be careful as there are a lot of counterfeit cards coming out of China.  The Used Dell and IBM are most likely genuine.  Carefully look for a vendor with a good reputation, buy from a vendor in your country, and avoid a direct purchase from China.   If you are not comfortable flashing/cross-flashing software/firmware, look for cards in the IT Mode. 

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  • 4 weeks later...

I just bought a Syba SY-PEX40039 2 port SATA card for my Optiplex 390 build and I cannot get it to work. Everything is fine when it’s installed but as soon as I connect a drive to it Unraid won’t boot - it stops with a flashing cursor before the boot menu comes up. Because it’s a Dell box I have no real controls in the bios to do anything. There is a brief Asmedia screen shown during boot which shows whatever disk I’ve connected but I can’t find any key combination to get into any settings of it. 
 

Is it not working because I can’t configure a setting because of the Dell bios or am I doing something wrong? This card is listed as “works out of the box” on the wiki.  

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It is definitely booting from the flash drive, or at least it’s definitely not booting from somewhere else. I’ve forced the boot order manually several times and I should have said that when the flashing cursor appears the keyboard becomes unresponsive (including caps lock and num lock stopping) so it feels more like a crash than a bad boot order. 
 

I’ve tried both UEFI and normal BIOS boots and they both work fine without any disks connected to the controller card but stop with the same symptoms if a disk is connected. I’ve tested with multiple disks, including the disks already in the server so I don’t think it’s a bad disk either. 

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That doesn’t make sense though, unless the bios for the controller card is overriding the bios from the motherboard because I can very definitely see the new disk in the MB bios and see that it’s not selected. I can also force boot from the USB and get the same behaviour. I wonder if it’s worth putting another OS on a disk and connecting to the controller to check. 
 

If it IS doing that is there a way to stop it? I’ve exhausted the options in the MB bios. 

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