I'm going to upgrade my whole unraid system..  Right now I have some supermicro 8 port add in card

that I believe is pci-e 1.0 and sata 3Gb/s

Is it worth upgrading to a pci-e 2.0 card that is Sata 6Gb/s?

 

I'm going to have a NVMe 250GB disk as a cache and use some of the onboard 6GB/s (6 of them, I believe)  for parity

and the other big disks and use the other card for the smaller (older) disks.

 

So it is worth upgrading if I have such a fast cache drive?  I'm looking at a SAS9201-8i on e-bay for $44..  I assume my cables would still work?

 

It's mainly used for media backup but the new server will host my home DVR as well 

 

Thanks,

 

Jim

Is the Supermicro card you have an AOC-SASLP-MV8. That card can have compatibility issues with unRaid, and would suggest replacing it.

 

You might read this to better understand if you need a PCIe 2.0 card. In general I would say yes.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, bjp999 said:

Is the Supermicro card you have an AOC-SASLP-MV8. That card can have compatibility issues with unRaid, and would suggest replacing it.

 

You might read this to better understand if you need a PCIe 2.0 card. In general I would say yes.

 

 

 

 

I'd have to look and see what card I have.  But I've been running fine with it for years now. So I doubt there are any compatibility issues unless there is when plugging into my new MB.

I'm currently looking at a SAS9201-8i 6GB PCIe Express 2.0  I found one on e-bay for $44....  so I might just buy it.

 

 

 

Does anyone know off the top of their head..

Is the 9201-8i  a x8 card?  or is it a x4 card? (I know it has 8 disk ports.. I'm talking about PCIe- lanes..)

 

Update:  It looks like like it's a x8 chip..  I had to go to broadcom's website to find it! :-)

Edited June 8, 20179 yr by jbuszkie

4 hours ago, jbuszkie said:

Does anyone know off the top of their head..

Is the 9201-8i  a x8 card?  or is it a x4 card? (I know it has 8 disk ports.. I'm talking about PCIe- lanes..)

 

Update:  It looks like like it's a x8 chip..  I had to go to broadcom's website to find it! :-)

 

Yes - its a x8 card. But it wold work fine with only 4 lanes (some motherboards have x8 or x16 slots which are only wired for x4.) You'd really only need the 8 lanes if running in in a PCIe 1.x slot.

 

The 9201 is a good card. I have the -16i and -16e versions which are also x8 card, each running twice as many drives as the -8i version the the same number of lanes.