[solved] Need help finding a reasonably priced 8 drive controller card

[Just Me]

Hey!

 

I'm running unRAID 6.5.2 on an older Asus M4A785T-M motherboard with an AMD Athlon II X2 235e CPU. The motherboard offers 6x SATA 3 Gb/s ports and one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot. I would like to use the PCIe slot to add a controller card for eight additional drives. I don't want to spend too much money, so I thought about a used server card from IBM, Dell or HP? It seems these cards are available for an affordable price on eBay, but I'm totally lost which card I should choose. The controller should work with the latest unRAID version, it seems Marvell chipsets can cause problems though they were  a preferred solution for older unRAID in the past. So I guess a LSI based card is recommend, something like LSI 9xyz-8i but the "xyz" is the problem, there are sooooo many different versions. 

The LSI SAS 9207-8i seems to be a nice card and is available for 70 EUR but directly from China, so maybe it is a "fake", seems too cheap and I don't want to deal with customs. Shops from Europe start at 200 EUR and that is way too expensive. 

 

Can you please suggest an affordable controller card which works without issues under current (and hopefully future) unRAID versions, is compatible with my motherboard and supports 12 TB drives. Would be great, if it would works out of the box, but I guess a cheap OEM card needs a crossflash to work with unRAID. 

 

Edit: Maybe a HP H220? Seems reasonably priced. 

 

Thank you in advance und sorry for another "need help" thread 

Edited June 1, 2018 by Just Me
solved added

[JorgeB]

Any LSI with a SAS2008/2308/3008 chipset in IT mode, e.g., 9201-8i, 9211-8i, 9207-8i, 9300-8i, etc and clones, like the Dell H200/H310 and IBM M1015, these latter ones need to be crossflashed.

[Just Me]

Thank you for your reply. "Original" LSI cards seems to bee very pricy, so I guess I need to buy an OEM Card. The Dell H310 is pretty cheap on ebay but needs to be crossflashed. I hope I will not brick it. Or maybe a HP H220? Seems to be more up to date because the card has PCIe 3.0 and it is a HBA without RAID so I guess I don't need to crossflash it? 

 

 

 

 

[JorgeB]

I believe the H220 is same as a LSI 9207-8i with a different firmware, it should be plug and play and also easily flashable to LSI.

[Just Me]

I've found a cheap Dell H310 and crossflashed it. Seems to work fine as far as I can tell. Thanks again for the help.