Switching from motherboard sata ports to HBA. Have questions before I do this...can you help?

[tr3bjockey]

Don't feel obligated to give me your opinion on every question.  If you can only answer 1 or 2 per person that's fine.

 

I'm running 4 HD and 2 cache ssd's off of motherboard sata ports.  The other day 3 drives disappeared and I think the sata ports are starting to fail possibly.  (I could feel all the hard drives motor were running so it wasn't power related.

 

Anyway....I was planning to get a sas 2008 based controller that can handle 8 sata drives and stop using onboard sata ports.

 

Questions:

1.  When my unraid pc boots up, will it automatically find the name/serial # of the drives and start using them off of the sas 2008 controller?

   a.  Do I not have to worry about drivers for unraid as it should be already built in correct?

 

2.  Should I split the SSD's so that both ssd's are on the same port of the hba?  I.e  1 ssd on hba port 1 and 2nd ssd on hba port 2.  Will it make a difference?

 

3.  The card is running on pcie 2.0 x8.  Is this going to bottle neck my spinning 4tb hard drives when parity happens?  (I have 4 hard drives right now so it's probably not an issue.  When I get up to 8 hard drives or 12 hard drives, am I going to see a bottleneck at the PCIe x8 bus?  Avg speed of hard drives is about 120-160Mb/s

 

4.  Will unraid be able to spin down hard drives?

 

5.  Will unraid not be able to perform trim on SSD's?

 

6.  Trying to think of everything before I pull the trigger on this.  Is there anything I'm giving up by using an HBA card?  (have a cheap graphics card running on x1 pcie to save my 2 pcie 16's for future hba card upgrades.

Edited February 26, 2022 by tr3bjockey
spelling

[JorgeB]

Assuming HBA is using latest IT mode firmware:

 

4 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

1.  When my unraid pc boots up, will it automatically find the name/serial # of the drives and start using them off of the sas 2008 controller?

Yes

 

5 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

a.  Do I not have to worry about drivers for unraid as it should be already built in correct?

Correct 

 

5 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

2.  Should I split the SSD's so that both ssd's are on the same port of the hba?  I.e  1 ssd on hba port 1 and 2nd ssd on hba port 2.  Will it make a difference?

No

 

5 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

3.  The card is running on pcie 2.0 x8.  Is this going to bottle neck my spinning 4tb hard drives when parity happens?  (I have 4 hard drives right now so it's probably not an issue.  When I get up to 8 hard drives or 12 hard drives, am I going to see a bottleneck at the PCIe x8 bus?  Avg speed of hard drives is about 120-160Mb/s

There's enough bandwidth for 8 hard drives (and more, more require an expander)

 

5 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

4.  Will unraid be able to spin down hard drives?

Yes

 

5 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

5.  Will unraid not be able to perform trim on SSD's?

Trim won't work. 

 

5 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

6.  Trying to think of everything before I pull the trigger on this.  Is there anything I'm giving up by using an HBA card?  (have a cheap graphics card running on x1 pcie to save my 2 pcie 16's for future hba card upgrades.

Not really, you'll lose a slot and increase power consumption a little, also make sure it's sufficiently cooled, there needs to be some airflow on/around it.

[tr3bjockey]

On 2/26/2022 at 12:12 AM, JorgeB said:

Assuming HBA is using latest IT mode firmware:

 

 

 

Trim won't work.

Thanks a bunch for the very organized answers to my questions.  Made it very easy to read. 🙂

 

Are more advanced card capable of doing trim?

 

I assume SSD garbage collection won't be disabled in the SSD card and will continue to work?

 

Would I be able to use both my MB on board sata ports for the SSD and the sas2008 card the mechanical drives or does the MB somehow get disabled?

 

Will temperature readings still be transmitted through the sas2008 cards for the hard drives?

[JorgeB]

7 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

Are more advanced card capable of doing trim?

LSI SAS3 models, based on the SAS3008 chip like the 9300-8i, will trim SSDs, but only those with Deterministic read ZEROs after TRIM support.

 

7 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

assume SSD garbage collection won't be disabled in the SSD card and will continue to work?

It should.

 

7 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

Would I be able to use both my MB on board sata ports for the SSD and the sas2008 card the mechanical drives or does the MB somehow get disabled?

Yes, you can still use them.

 

7 hours ago, tr3bjockey said:

Will temperature readings still be transmitted through the sas2008 cards for the hard drives?

Yes.

 

[tr3bjockey]

Thank you very much for answering my questions.  :-)