Hi,

 

Just wondering if anyone has had any luck running a Unicaca SAS 3008 or Perc H3300 PCI-e controller card? Not sure if this will work or it will need flashing to IT mode?

 

Any Pointers? Looking for a cheap 12gb/s card.

 

Many Thanks

Edited January 18, 20197 yr by mbc0
Update

3 minutes ago, mbc0 said:

Unicaca SAS 3008

This looks like a cheap Chinese LSI imitation, but maybe not.

 

LSI 9300-8i (SAS3008) works great and is plug and play.

I cannot find any LSi's on ebay in the UK at all.. just found those Unicaca 3008's and the Dell Perc H330 's 

 

Looks like a rebrand rather than imitation but who knows! 

 

Thanks for the info @johnnie.black

Hi @johnnie.black

 

Would you mind checking this LSI 9300 card out please? and can you please recommend a cable to split to SATA at all? there are so so so many choices so looking for recommendations.

 

Thanks for your time!

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/LSI-SAS3008-9300-8I-Host-Bus-Adapter-PCI-E-3-0-SATA-SAS-8-Port-SAS3-12Gb-s/292817216479?epid=553123832&hash=item442d4423df:g:HHkAAOSwXEdaX2BV:rk:15:pf:0

 

 

The Perc H330 works great, never tried to flash it to the IT firmware.

the Dell HBA330 is even better (same HW but with IT firmware out of the box)

3 hours ago, mbc0 said:

Would you mind checking this LSI 9300 card out please?

I'm wary of new Chinese LSI controllers, Intel NICs, etc, big chance of getting a fake, I usually prefer buying used server pulls, got an 9300-8i used for around $120, with cables, cables you need are like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-SFF-8643-Breakout/dp/B01BW1U2L2/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1547854650&sr=8-4&keywords=SFF-8643+sata

Thanks @johnnie.black I have found a Dell HBA330+ for £120 (UK) a PERC H330 For £79 (UK) and a LSI 3008 for £85 (China)

 

I guess if the PERC H330 works as @LammeN3rd says then there would be no benefit paying the extra for the HBA330+ or waiting a month for the LSI from China and just go for the PERC?

 

Any final thought's before I hit the buy now button?

 

Many Thanks for all your time guys

Not sure if the H330 will show SMART data, maybe @LammeN3rdcan confirm, if yes it should be fine, though the LBA HBA driver is usually preferable to the LSI RAID driver.

Thanks buddy! hopefully @LammeN3rd can confirm, then I will read up on selecting drivers! didn't know you could do that in unRAID 🙂

4 minutes ago, mbc0 said:

then I will read up on selecting drivers! didn't know you could do that in unRAID

You can't, if the HBA is in IT mode it will load the HBA driver (mpt3sas), if it's in RAID mode it will use the RAID driver, (mrsas IIRC), with the latter one sometimes tere's no SMART, disks are also usually not identified by the s/n and the driver is not as used/tested as the HBA driver.

ah, gotcha! that makes sense! 

 

Thanks Again!!

This looks promising!

 

I got this from the Dell Website for the H330

 

Switching the controller to HBA mode NOTE: Prior to switching the controller from the RAID mode to the HBA mode, ensure that you review the pre-requisites. For more information see the Prerequisites for RAID to HBA mode transition. 1 Enter the Dell PERC 9 Configuration Utility. See Navigating to PERC 9 Configuration Utility. 2 Click Controller Management > Advanced Controller Management > Switch to HBA mode. The controller is switched to the HBA mode. You must reboot the system for the change to be eected. 3 Click OK.

Bought 2x new LSI 9300-8i from eBay. Looked for a Chinese dealer with highest rating and count of ratings. Every order took 2 weeks to arrive. All in perfect package und working happily with unRAID. Was around 90-99 EUR last time.

 

When I find a used one from EU/US with that price I would prefer that.

 

Thanks buddy! hopefully [mention=80200]LammeN3rd[/mention] can confirm, then I will read up on selecting drivers! didn't know you could do that in unRAID [emoji846]

The H330 usages the megaraid_sas driver and works oud of the box!
I use it for about a year now in Unraid (HBA mode) never had any problems with smart (or anything for that matter)

It’s wicked fast!!



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Fantastic thank you! Just waiting for delivery now 😉

Hi. Wondering why get these over perc h310, sas 6g, up to 8 drives I believe.


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3 minutes ago, jang430 said:

Hi. Wondering why get these over perc h310, sas 6g, up to 8 drives I believe.


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Hi,

 

I already have 2 6gb controllers but I have 12gb drives now and will be getting more in the future.

I thought even with a faster controller and faster drives, it still won't perform any faster than the 6 Gbps of sata 3, or maybe not even reaching sata 2 speeds?


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If you combine this card (or another SAS3008 based card) with an compatible LSI 12Gbit SAS expander you can add way more drives without losing performance. older cards and expanders would run on the lowest link speed but these support DataBolt technology so you can run multiple 6Gbit drives on an expander without losing any performance! 

 

I did an test a while ago with 18 drives connected (12x HDD and 6x SSD all SATA) and got ~5.5GB/s 

the full bandwidth of 8x 12Gbit SAS is not possible since the 8x PCIe bus is not fast enough

What is an expander exactly? Apart from this hba controller, expander have other functions? What does it look like?


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An SAS expander is like a switch, it's usually found on backplanes connecting to a gig amount of drives.

a 36 port expander can connect to a SAS HBA (SAS Card) with 4 or 8 lanes (ports) and the rest of the ports connected to disks.

the disks will share the bandwidth, with older SAS tech this could give performance bottlenecks but with SAS 12Gbit and Databold the only way you can run into that is with very fast SSD's

 

My server has an 26 port expander 8 for the connection to my Perc H330 and 18 for the disks.

since all my disks are 6Gbit SATA even 18 drives will not create an bottleneck on the 8x 12Gbit lanes from the H330

Edited January 19, 20197 yr by LammeN3rd

18 minutes ago, LammeN3rd said:

I did an test a while ago with 18 drives connected (12x HDD and 6x SSD all SATA) and got ~5.5GB/s 

the full bandwidth of 8x 12Gbit SAS is not possible since the 8x PCIe bus is not fast enough

Can you explain this a bit?  How are those drives used in unraid?  Array?  I thought adding more drives (per share) won't provide any added speed benefit?  Please correct me if I'm wrong.  Very interested in this.

This is great info @LammeN3rd Thank you! I am learning a lot from you. Is Databolt only on the LSI cards though? (I thought it was an LSI Technology?)

 

I was going to go down the route of running 2 cards and keeping only the 12gb SAS drives on the H330 as I believe if I connect my 12GB SAS Drives on the same card as my 6GB SATA Drives the card would only run as fast as the slowest drive?  The reason for this thinking was to keep the parity drives on 12GB SAS.

 

What expander do you use on the PERC H330?

 

Here is my motherboard config and I think I would have an issue doing this as the PCI Lanes would slow down due to the amount of cards I have installed?

 

I have a PERC H330 PCIeX8 Gen3 on the way going in slot 1

SAS 2008 PCIeX8 Gen2 (6GB/S) Slot 2

Mellonox 10gbe PCIeX8 Gen2 slot 3

 

 

13 minutes ago, jang430 said:

Can you explain this a bit?  How are those drives used in unraid?  Array?  I thought adding more drives (per share) won't provide any added speed benefit?  Please correct me if I'm wrong.  Very interested in this.

If you enable Turbowrite you need full bandwidth of all disks, read/write to a share is max 1 disk of throughput 

for parity checks or rebuilds you need full bandwidth as well.

 

the test I did was a parity check on the disks combined with a BTRFS scrub on the 6x SSD cache (since moved to NVMe)

Thanks @LammeN3rd, will read more on this.  You've been very helpful.