Hi

 

I'm currently using a P410 with a 12 bay chassis, but am awaiting a delivery of a H220 in order for unRaid to handle the disks more effectively, allow spin down and SMART capability rather than passing each drive as a Logical RAID 0 with the P410.

 

But I'm a little confused.....my 12 bay backplane only has 1 mini SAS port/cable, whereas the H220 has 2 min SAS Port....will I be able to use all 12 disk slots on my chassis with the H220 only connected with the one cable, or am I going to hit a disk limit, or is one cable just going to limit throughput?

 

Throughput limitation is fine as it's just a media server, and it can serve 4k without any problems, so I'm not looking for blazing speeds, I just need the capacity.  I currently have 9 x SAS 2TB 7.2k drives, 2 x SATA 3TB WD Red drives for Parity, and 1 x 120gb SSD for cache....is this all going to work with the H220 and my 12 bay backplane, or do I need an expander, but I don't see how an expander will help if I only have the 1 mini SAS port on the backplane, hence my confusion.  Google hasn't helped much here, and I'm a noob concerning enterprise equipment!

 

Also, once the H220 is working (fingers crossed not much flashing is required) am I correct in my understanding that once the drives are handled by unRaid, they will be readable by controller individually, and not unreadable separately like in traditional RAID stripe setups?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Leo

3 minutes ago, darkcyde said:

will I be able to use all 12 disk slots on my chassis with the H220 only connected with the one cable

Yes, the backplane should have a builtin expander.

That's what I figured, but wasn't sure.  I thought I might have to daisy chain from the HBA to an expander and then to the backplane to get the 12 bays working.

 

Thanks!

Ok, so the H220 card arrived, I plugged it in and it was recognised, fans didn't go nuts, and it accepted the single drive that I tested it with, it went through to unRaid and the disk was present, so I powered down, plugged in all the drives, and then it sat at POST for the HBA at Initialising phase.  So I ended up flashing the H220 with the LSI firmware as per this thread, and it all worked perfectly.

 

Funnily enough tho, when I offered up the existing disks to unRaid via the new HBA, the option was there for me to mount the disks and I could see all the files, whereas I thought that creating Logicals via the P410 as RAID 0 per disk would render the disks unreadable anywhere but in the P410.  I decided to preclear all the disks again anyway just to be sure, and now I'm restoring all my data.

 

Thanks for everyones help!

Edited November 7, 20187 yr by darkcyde
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