SAS upgrade checklist?

[Harblar]

Hi all.

 

Lookin for someone with a lot more knowledge on the subject double check my upgrade process and tell me if I've missed anything important.

 

Last week I undertook the once a decade process of upgrading my UnRAID server. New Mobo, New CPU, New PSU, and 4 times the RAM.

 

Basically I had a 15 year old drive (14.5 years worth of poweron time) die on me. Luckily I was anticipating this and had it and 3 other drives, still in my array, but with zero files on them. So I figured it was an opportune time to do a lot of clean up and expansion. I removed 4 old drives (1x1TB and 3x 2TB drives, all with over a decade of power on hours) and that left me with 7 SATA III drives in my array, as follows:

Parity - Seagate EXOS X16 ST16000NM001G 16TB

Disc 1 - Seagate EXOS X16 ST16000NM001G 16TB

Disc 2 - Seagate Skyhawk ST10000VX0004 10TB

Disc 3 - Seagate Desktop ST4000DM000 4TB

Disc 4 - Seagate Desktop ST4000DM000 4TB

Disc 5 - Seagate Desktop ST4000DM000 4TB

Disc 6 - Seagate EXOS X10 ST10000NM0086 10TB

 

I've ordered a couple more used/refurbished EXOS 16TB SAS Drives and a Used LSI SAS9300-16i HBA. My Hardware after this final round of upgrades will look be as follows:

UnRAID OS Pro ver. 6.12.10

CPU - Intel i5 14500

MB - MSI ProZ690-A

RAM - 4x32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5-5200

HBA - LSI SAS9300-16i (unsure of currently installed firmware/bios... will update to latest IT firmware and bios)

Connections - 2x8643 mini-SAS to 4x 8482 connectors for a total of 8 drives connected.

PSU - Corsair HX1000i

Cache - Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD 1TB NVME M.2

Drive configuration post update:

Parity - Seagate Exos X16 ST16000NM002G 16TB SAS 12/Gbps

Disc 1 - Seagate Exos X16 ST16000NM002G 16TB SAS 12/Gbps

Disc 2 - Seagate EXOS X16 ST16000NM001G 16TB SATA 6/Gbps

Disc 3 - Seagate EXOS X16 ST16000NM001G 16TB SATA 6/Gbps

Disc 4 - Seagate Skyhawk ST10000VX0004 10TB SATA 6/Gbps

Disc 5 - Seagate Desktop ST4000DM000 4TB SATA 6/Gbps

Disc 6 - Seagate Desktop ST4000DM000 4TB SATA 6/Gbps

Disc 7 - Seagate EXOS X10 ST10000NM0086 10TB SATA 6/Gbps

 

SHOULD the LSI HBA not already be flashed to the latest IT Firmware and BIOS, I have downloaded the following 3 Files for the process via UnRAID's terminal following this forum post:

Linux Executable: sas3flash_linux_x64_rel/sas3flash   (I had to Pull this executable from the Broadcom firmware downloads for the 9300-8i since the 16i downloads only include the firmware/bios zip... I assume it'll work for this as well?)

SAS9300_16i_IT.bin

mptsas3.rom

 

Now, given my UEFI based MB, should I instead be looking at doing an EFI upgrade to the bios on the LSI card instead? (So fair warning. I have just enough knowledge on this stuff to get in the ballpark, but I'm still slightly confused by some of the technicalities, such as this bit about Bios vs EFI and exactly what that means as far as getting this all working correctly, so any help or clarifications when I obviously get something confused or flat out wrong, would be super appreciated.)

 

Finally, I've been running my own UnRAID server for over 15 years now. That said, it has been 99% set and forget storage for my extensive collection of 1:1 MKV ripped movies. Minimal to no transcoding and usually only 1 user at a time, soooo... most of the above is massive overkill for my needs. I've started hosting a game server, but even that isn't very taxing. As far as the movies go, I rip my movies using an internal drive and ripping directly to a specified HDD. In other words, the SAS and HBA, are probably pointless for me in terms of performance, but whatever. Maybe it'll make the monthly parity checks go a bit quicker at least. lol  Anyway... too that end, is there any specific settings/utilities/plugins/etc... that I can implement to maximize the performance from my new hardware? I've seen mention of ZFS drive pools and stuff, but a lot of that is outside of my wheelhouse (Honestly, I only know i need to flash IT firmware, but not exactly why. lol)

 

Anyway, TLDR: Check my hardware setup above and tell me if I missed anything significant in my planned move to an HBA and SAS drives.

 

Thanks!

[Harblar]

Sooooo... I'm just going to assume from that overwhelming response that I'm on the right track with the above then.
 

Should things go horribly wrong, I'll be sure to be back with some Joe Exotic gifs and a whole bunch more questions! 😂

[Harblar]

ALLLLllLlLllll- Righty then... Got my LSI Card installed and, honestly, I think it was good to go from before I bought it. It apparently has an EFI bios since it showed up in my Motherboard's UEFI Bios. According to the data there it already has an IT firmware on both controllers. Sooo... Good to go there, and it shows up in my device list in UnRAID. So far so good.

The only thing of note is that the firmware version is 7.0.1.0 and the version I found on Broadcom's website is 16.00.10.00. Obviously its pretty out of date, but does it really matter much for this? Any significant reason to upgrade it to the current firmware? Any other settings I should be adjusting for this?

 

I haven't plugged a drive in to it yet (damn amazon is taking forever getting me my breakout cables, but I should have them later today). 

 

Anyway... This feels like it's going too easy. NOTHING seemingly simple EVER goes this easy for me. I've gotta be missing something, but I have no idea what. Lol

[JorgeB]

I would recommend updating, it's not complicated:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/97870-how-to-upgrade-an-lsi-hba-firmware-using-unraid/

 

[Harblar]

Yep, that's the guide I referenced in my first post. I did a bit more digging and found the slightly updated firmware that freenas and broadcom collaborated on and, after some trial an error getting a directory set up on my flash drive and copied over to ram I got everything to work. Can confirm all firmware and bios are up to date. System starts with minimal issue (seems like if I reboot/power down I have to enter the mb's uefi bios and reboot from there before unra8d will load. No idea why, though it might be my 15+ year old sony USB flash drive... Just getting it to show up on my laptop's file manager was tricky, so I'll probably be updating that as well in the coming weeks). Plugged all my drives in via the breakout cable and every single drive spun up and was properly detected. First of my new 16tb SAS drives is currently preclearing and everything seems to be running well!🤘