I'm looking at adding a raid card to my Unraid system as my mobo has 6 ports and I want to add more drives.  I was looking at the recommended list for 8-port cards and saw the Supermicro.  Upon pricing it with my local computer stores they have two similar ones listed. Which one should I get? Not sure.

 

Thanks

 

 

The SAS2 is a PCIe x8 device and supports SATA-III devices, whereas the older card is x4 and only supports SATA-II.

 

If you're only ever go to use hard drives, you will never notice a difference between the two cards.  If you are planning on adding SSD's, then definitely go with the SAS2

Thanks. at the moment only HD's but I hope someday to add an SSD as a cache drive.  Just checking but by running all of my drives together off the card instead of the mobo I am going to see some performance improvements?

Should be more or less the same performance. 

 

On my system, with 4 drives on the motherboard, 7 on my SAS2LP I get ~114 MB/s Peak for parity checks.

You'll rarely regret having the potential for higher performance. 

Thanks.  Going to swap my drives over the the card.

I have 2 x SAS2LP with 14 drives. I thought that the more drives there are the more congestion there would be on the SASLP and this would affect the speed of parity checks/builds, preclears, disc rebuilds. My parity check speed max is about 158 MB/s.

glad to hear it can handle a good number of drives.