mbc0 Posted January 18, 2019 Share Posted January 18, 2019 (edited) 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, 2019 by mbc0 Update Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted January 18, 2019 Share Posted January 18, 2019 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. 1 Quote Link to comment
mbc0 Posted January 18, 2019 Author Share Posted January 18, 2019 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 Quote Link to comment
mbc0 Posted January 18, 2019 Author Share Posted January 18, 2019 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 Quote Link to comment
LammeN3rd Posted January 18, 2019 Share Posted January 18, 2019 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) 1 Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted January 18, 2019 Share Posted January 18, 2019 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 1 Quote Link to comment
mbc0 Posted January 18, 2019 Author Share Posted January 18, 2019 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 Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted January 18, 2019 Share Posted January 18, 2019 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. 1 Quote Link to comment
mbc0 Posted January 18, 2019 Author Share Posted January 18, 2019 Thanks buddy! hopefully @LammeN3rd can confirm, then I will read up on selecting drivers! didn't know you could do that in unRAID 🙂 Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 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. 1 Quote Link to comment
mbc0 Posted January 19, 2019 Author Share Posted January 19, 2019 ah, gotcha! that makes sense! Thanks Again!! Quote Link to comment
mbc0 Posted January 19, 2019 Author Share Posted January 19, 2019 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. Quote Link to comment
hawihoney Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 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. 1 Quote Link to comment
LammeN3rd Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 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 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!!Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 1 Quote Link to comment
mbc0 Posted January 19, 2019 Author Share Posted January 19, 2019 Fantastic thank you! Just waiting for delivery now 😉 Quote Link to comment
jang430 Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 Hi. Wondering why get these over perc h310, sas 6g, up to 8 drives I believe.Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
mbc0 Posted January 19, 2019 Author Share Posted January 19, 2019 3 minutes ago, jang430 said: Hi. Wondering why get these over perc h310, sas 6g, up to 8 drives I believe. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Hi, I already have 2 6gb controllers but I have 12gb drives now and will be getting more in the future. Quote Link to comment
jang430 Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 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?Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
LammeN3rd Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 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 1 Quote Link to comment
jang430 Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 What is an expander exactly? Apart from this hba controller, expander have other functions? What does it look like? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
LammeN3rd Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 (edited) 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, 2019 by LammeN3rd 1 Quote Link to comment
jang430 Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 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. Quote Link to comment
mbc0 Posted January 19, 2019 Author Share Posted January 19, 2019 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 Quote Link to comment
LammeN3rd Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 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) Quote Link to comment
jang430 Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 Thanks @LammeN3rd, will read more on this. You've been very helpful. Quote Link to comment
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.