A server that my buddy just bought, has this raid/controller card in it, and was wondering if anyone has ever used this card, or had any luck using it?

 

it is a 20 port controller (16 internal, 4 external), so if it would work, that would be awesome!  I can't seem to even find in the documents about harddrive size limitations, but it does say that it supports JBOD in the docs, but not on the main page...

 

As soon as he gets it, I will take a look and see if it will work... but until then, thought I would ask here.

 

http://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/raid/sas_raid/sas-51645/

I'm interested in your findings.

Well... got my "new" server today..  this card, says it supports JBOD, but I can't get unraid to see it.  When it first booted up, it didn't see my 3TB as a 3, but as a 2TB, so I reflashed the bios (that was fun to figure out), and it shows up as a 2.7TB now... but only in the controller config... I can't set it to JBOD, maybe if i was to "initialize" the drive, i might... but I didn't want to do that just yet.

 

Looks like this card isn't going to work... oh well, it was worth a shot!  Good new, the mobo has:

6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports

3 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (at x16/x16/x1 or x16/x8/x8 mode)

1 x PCIe x4

2 x PCI

 

so, I can use my 2x supermicro  AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 controllers, and put in a third...  and I have a 5 bay external case... that's good for up to 35 drives... LOL

 

Considering I have 19 drives now, and the new case is only a 20bay, and I have another 3TB to go in, I think I should be ok.  I was just hoping that this would work in my favour... I guess not.

 

 

 

I am thinking about keeping my unraid as it is, maybe move the nzbget, and sonarr off, put that on the "new" server, and keep plex and unraid on the current one...  and use the "new" one as a windows server, with some VM's?  I don't know yet...  the "new" server is only an i7 930, with 12gb ram...

Thanks for the feedback.

 

Maybe you should think about replacing your drives with bigger ones