February 10, 201016 yr Hi new the the site and in the mist of building an unraid system.Like a few others i purchased a Norco 4220 case and want to get it set up with unraid I have a few question if anyone can give some advice after reading tons of info. My equipment is as follows- Norco 4220 case M2N-E mother board 1 gig of mem 1-550 watt ATX power supply 2 -1.5 w/d green sata drives along with 5 -1 tb green sata drives Adaptec sas 3085 external ports 2-sff-8088 cables and 2/sff-8087 cables more to be added 2-Port SFF-8088 to SFF-8087 Adapter I would like to set it up once 1st wondering if this 3085 card will work I have not seen it in the list it does have expander support. 2nd is the unraid software able to support the expander cards yet if not will it in the near future was looking at the hp expander or the CHENBRO AC CK13601 EXPANDER this would let me hook up all the drives and be done with it. case connections are sff-8087. Any info or help would be appreciated. Or any other work around to have all bays set and ready to go. Great board lots of info and looking forward to running unraid. Lou
February 10, 201016 yr Despite SAS support (which I doubt it exists in unRAID at this point, and not sure about aacraid driver), I'd not recommend the card you have chosen. Simply because it does not support so-called true JBOD mode, so you'd have to create RAID0 volumes, which is not a good practice (due to metadata written which makes the drives non-portable to other controllers, so you'd have to find exactly the same card should it fail).
February 10, 201016 yr Author Thanks for the input what card from the list would you recommend that is true JBod mode and would be able to use the expander in near future with sff-8807 connectors?
February 10, 201016 yr For now I'd hold off on purchasing a raid/sas card and expander until Lime-Tech finishes SAS support and adds a few more SAS raids cards. LSI cards with a firmware flash to non raid firmware are supposed to support native sata drives. Areca controllers also support true jbod. If you want to get it up and running now, buy two reverse SFF-8807 cables and a 4 port sata card. You can use the motherboard sata ports and SIL3114/1430SA or something similar for now until Lime-Tech finishes SAS support and adds a few more drivers/modules.
February 11, 201016 yr Author So can I use a sff-8087 fanout cable but in reverse or is there a special cable? Answered my own question with google thanks order a few reverse cables Lou
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