Recommended SATA card for 24+ Drives


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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!

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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. 

 

 

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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. 

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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.

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  • 4 months later...

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.

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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.

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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

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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?

 

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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?

 

 

 

 

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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.

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  • 2 months later...

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