Hi All,

I am moving away from my 'tower' that has 2 SAS to SATA LSI expansion cards (currently have 16 drives). I am unfamiliar with this 'SFF8643' backplane, that I am assuming is what connects all the disks to the motherboard. I can have a maximum of 24 disks in this case and want to ensure I can support all of these from the start, what sort of PCI card do I need to connect to this backplane (there seems to be 6 connectors with 2 mini-sas in each block:

Cheers

Your current cards should continue to work, but need different cables. Each cable can handle 4 drives, your HBAs should have 2 connectors, so they sum up to 16 drives.

You either need another one of those, or (more likely because you run out of slots) need one that can handle 16 drives (+ one of the old cards).

In total you will need 6 SAS cables. (not "SAS to..." but simply SAS)

Thanks for that!

My aim is to keep my 'old' server/desktop case in a different location (Cabin at bottom of garden) and put my server rack in the garage with a completely new setup (with a new unraid pro license).

So it looks like I can probably buy just two of these:

LSI SAS 9300-16I 16 Port Controller HBA Card with PCIe Slot

These are quite (£60) cheap - gives me 'more' expansion which I probably won't need and is much cheaper than buying just one of these:

BROADCOM 05-25699-00 SAS 9305-24i

about £200.

and get the correct 6 cables to connect everything up.

I am assuming the only advantage to having 1 card over 2 is the number of pci-e slots I need? As they only need x8 then this isn't really an issue either if I just get a board with several pci-e slots in it.

I am also looking at making all network connections (where practical) optical with 10Gb cards - I get excited just thinking about it all - quite sad really!

Cheers.

Make sure you are getting the HBAs in "IT" mode. UNRAID does not support RAID mode or something.