June 23, 20179 yr Hi again guys, I am trying to find out what card I should buy since my RAID card does not allow an IT mode, can anyone recommend a card that works with unraid and supports 24+ drives either by itself or with an expander card that I can buy to supplement? Thanks in advance for any help!
June 23, 20179 yr start here: https://wiki.lime-technology.com/Hardware_Compatibility#PCI_SATA_Controllers
June 23, 20179 yr Author Yeah I've looked there, but surely there must be someone with firsthand experience with a card they can recommend, does not look like any of the cards there support more than 16 drives, and I need support for 24 drives or ideally more. So I probably need an expander, and I have no experience with that so would appreciate if someone more knowledgeable than me has some insight on what I can use and what is supported.
June 23, 20179 yr LSI 9211-8i or 9207-8i plus an Intel SAS expander, 36 port one (RES2CV360) for best performance, 24 port (RES2SV240) if the other is too expensive.
June 23, 20179 yr @johnnie.black or LSI SAS 9201-16i and RES2SV240 with two SFF cables between them for no performance penality?
June 23, 20179 yr Still a penalty due to the PCIe 2.0 bus, real world max usable bandwidth is usually <2500MB/s.
June 23, 20179 yr 3 minutes ago, johnnie.black said: Still a penalty due to the PCIe 2.0 bus, real world max usable bandwidth is usually <2500MB/s. ok, then two IBM1015(rebranded LSI9240-8i) and RES2SV240 - 16 + 8, or may be 3 IBM1015 cards. it depends from motherboard too - how many and which PCIe revision slots it have.
June 23, 20179 yr 1 hour ago, uldise said: depends from motherboard too - how many and which PCIe revision slots it have. Yes, if the board supports PCIe 3.0 best option would be an LSI 9207-8i dual linked to the 36 port Intel Expander, 4400MB/s usable bandwidth for the 24 disks, so ~180MB/s for each, that's pretty good.
June 23, 20179 yr Author OK I am going to look into getting the LSI 9207 and expander then, motherboard does support PCIe 3.0. thanks a lot for the help I appreciate it very much!
October 29, 20178 yr After a couple of days of trawling through many, many posts, I thought adding to this one would make sense since it's a very similar question. I'm looking to update an older system to support ~24 drives. I currently have this mobo (http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/880GM-LE FX/#osW732) with a SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 card to give (what seems like slow) access to 8 drives (+6 onboard for 14 in total). I had been looking at the LSI00244 9201-16i card thinking I could just swap out one for the other to allow 22 drives (6 onboard, 16 on the card) but, from what I've been reading, this seems wrong. Am I right in thinking I'll need a new mobo with PCIe 3, and a SAS expander card (one of the ones mentioned above) as well as something like the LSI card before I'm going to get anywhere? Still trying to get my head around a lot of the terms and tech so apologies if this is a daft question.
October 29, 20178 yr 55 minutes ago, kwilson81 said: I had been looking at the LSI00244 9201-16i card thinking I could just swap out one for the other to allow 22 drives (6 onboard, 16 on the card) but, from what I've been reading, this seems wrong. It's not wrong, you can use it for 16 disks.
October 29, 20178 yr Sorry, I meant that I thought I was wrong in thinking I could swap them out and it would work in a usable way. I'd been reading about issues with available bandwidth and thought that maybe just swapping the cards and attaching a bunch of disks would leave me with something too slow to be useful. Very happy if I'm wrong about that though.
October 29, 20178 yr 1 hour ago, kwilson81 said: Sorry, I meant that I thought I was wrong in thinking I could swap them out and it would work in a usable way. I'd been reading about issues with available bandwidth and thought that maybe just swapping the cards and attaching a bunch of disks would leave me with something too slow to be useful. Very happy if I'm wrong about that though. You should get a little over 100MB/s per drive during parity checks/rebuilds etc, that's an acceptable speed, PCIe 3.0 won't make any difference since that controller is PCIe 2.0
October 29, 20178 yr Awesome. I'll give it a go and see how well it works. Thanks for the info - much appreciated.
October 29, 20178 yr 9 hours ago, kwilson81 said: Am I right in thinking I'll need a new mobo with PCIe 3, and a SAS expander card (one of the ones mentioned above) as well as something like the LSI card before I'm going to get anywhere? Yes. I just looked at your motherboard you linked. That seems to be the root cause of your issue because it's a constraint. What case do you have or what were you planning to use?
October 29, 20178 yr Currently using a tower case with a couple of 5-in-3 cages. Pretty cramped now though. Plan is to update to a 4u or similar case (something like this) if I can support more drives.
October 29, 20178 yr 9 hours ago, kwilson81 said: I'm looking to update an older system to support ~24 drives. I went back rereading you post and noticed this. I've done this many times myself and I run into the same challenges your faced with. ~24 drives raises the challenge in trying to get any older system and get desired performance. For me I've tried it twice and found success, but never beyond 12-16 drives, that seems the tipping point that exposes too many constraints that are existing. Your motherboard is imposing a lot of constraints to reach some expectation of performance.The question for you is, what transfer rate do you desire?
October 29, 20178 yr 2 minutes ago, kwilson81 said: Plan is to update to a 4u or similar case (something like this) if I can support more drives. Are you in the UK? Curious cause that would limit some options I was going to recommend.
October 29, 20178 yr I'm just using the server for media so happy as long as it can handle that. Don't need transcoding or anything. Don't generally need multiple videos being accessed at the same time. I had an older SATA card (can't remember the exact model) in the same config that resulted in the system being unusable any time it was doing a library scan. I think there was a huge bottleneck in the card. In the UK, yes.
January 4, 20188 yr Sorry to thread hijack but what 8 port cards will work friendly in Supermicro motherboards and be friendly with 6 or 8 tb drives
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