21 minutes ago, mbc0 said:

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

 

 

 

the Link speed of these controllers is per disk (when direct connected to the controller without expander)

so if you connect both 6Gbit and 12Gbit directly to an H330 both will run their full speeds.

 

with expanders it's an different story and without DataBold it will run on the lowest speed.

DataBold is as far as I know its an LSI tech so you need an compatible LSI expander and LSI controller

 

From the graph you should be running in Config 3 so you get max BW to all cards!

 

if I remember correctly I'm running the SAS35X28R SAS EXPANDER connected with 8 lanes to the H330 (both ports)

this is my full config:

 

Dell Poweredge T630 | unRAID 6.6.6 - Pro | 2x E5-2640 V4 | 128GB ECC REG | PERC H330 12Gbit SAS (HBA Mode) | 18x Hotplug disks with 12Gbit SAS expander Backplane

Array 72TB with Dual Parity | HGST Ultrastar He10 10TB [ P1, P2 ,D1, D2, D3 ] | Seagate IronWolf 6TB [ D4, D5, D6, D7, D8, D9, D10 ] 

Cache 1920 GB RAID1 | 4x Samsung PM963 960GB NVMe

Edited January 19, 20197 yr by LammeN3rd

Ah, that's fantastic, 

 

I would be able to run my SAS 12GB Drives and 6GB SATA Drives all off the PERC H330 then!  So I can lose the SAS 2008 completely as I have 8 SATA Ports on my Motherboard as well to run my 6GB/S SATA Drives (I have 16 Drives in total) 

 

One last question if you don't mind, would I be better off putting my SSD Cache Drive (6GB/S SATA) on the PERC rather than a SATA 3 connector on the Motherboard?

 

Many Thanks Again For All Your Time! 

4 minutes ago, mbc0 said:

Ah, that's fantastic, 

 

I would be able to run my SAS 12GB Drives and 6GB SATA Drives all off the PERC H330 then!  So I can lose the SAS 2008 completely as I have 8 SATA Ports on my Motherboard as well to run my 6GB/S SATA Drives (I have 16 Drives in total) 

 

One last question if you don't mind, would I be better off putting my SSD Cache Drive (6GB/S SATA) on the PERC rather than a SATA 3 connector on the Motherboard?

 

Many Thanks Again For All Your Time! 

If you can, don't use you motherboard SATA, these are horrible! (no matter what board you have)

sata drives are fine for storage SATA controllers however are not made for parallel acces, in the best case they cripple your performance in the worst case you have drives dropping out putting your array in danger!

Edited January 19, 20197 yr by LammeN3rd

So would you say a SAS 2008 running at X4 would be better than on board SATA?

 

These are the on-board controllers I have

 

 

If you can, don't use you motherboard SATA, these are horrible! (no matter what board you have)

Have to disagree with this, Intel SATA controllers for example are rock solid and one of the best controllers anyone can use for SATA disks and SSDs.

 

 

Yes!

 

the Z77 chipset is connected by a DMI bus to you cpu (4x PCIe) and the ASMedia is connected to the Z77 

 

running an SAS 2008 on an 4x PCIe (gen2 because the SAS2008 does not support GEN3) gives you max 250MB/s per disk with 8 disks in parallel. if you only connect HDD you will only get there with very big and fast drives!

 

Besides speed SAS controllers (at least from LSI) are way more stable reason enough to stick to those since they cost very little nowadays 

15 minutes ago, mbc0 said:

One last question if you don't mind, would I be better off putting my SSD Cache Drive (6GB/S SATA) on the PERC rather than a SATA 3 connector on the Motherboard?

Use the onboard Intel controller, LSI with RAID driver most likely doesn't support trim, and LSI with HBA driver only supports trim on SSDs with read zero after trim or deterministic read after trim.

1 minute ago, johnnie.black said:

Have to disagree with this, Intel SATA controllers for example are rock solid and one of the best controllers anyone can use for SATA disks and SSDs.

 

 

might be stable but would you choose them over a cheap SAS2008?

1 minute ago, johnnie.black said:

Use the onboard Intel controller, LSI with RAID driver most likely doesn't support trim, and LSI with HBA driver only supports trim on SSDs with read zero after trim or deterministic read after trim.

did not think about trim.... I agree with you on this one!

I have learnt so much in 24 hours! Thanks so much for all your time @LammeN3rd & @johnnie.black 🙂

 

 

14 minutes ago, LammeN3rd said:

might be stable but would you choose them over a cheap SAS2008?

I use them together with one or more LSIs, depending on how many ports I need.

so if using 6Gb sas drives, and SATA 3 drives, is there reason to upgrade from SAS2008 to H330?

1 minute ago, jang430 said:

so if using 6Gb sas drives, and SATA 3 drives, is there reason to upgrade from SAS2008 to H330?

Not unless you also use an LSI SAS3 expander

so if using 6Gb sas drives, and SATA 3 drives, is there reason to upgrade from SAS2008 to H330?

Only when you use a sas expander, with direct connected sas 6gb and Sata 3 disks you don’t really have an advantage.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks!

13 minutes ago, LammeN3rd said:

 

Only when you use a sas expander, with direct connected sas 6gb and Sata 3 disks you don’t really have an advantage.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

 

So if I use the PERC H330 for my SAS 12gb/S Drives & SATA 3 Drives I will get 12gb/S Performance on my SAS & 6GB Performance on my SATA's BUT if I use an expander on that PERC H330 then I will only get the performance speed of the lowest drive... I hope I have got this right?

Let me try to see if I get this   If drives are connected to the controller directly, they get the most out of the drive's speed directly.  It's only when you use an expander, that will split the bandwidth (if that is what we call it), and in old controllers, use the speed of the slowest device, will using an H330 benefit, since it has that LSI technology.

7 minutes ago, jang430 said:

Let me try to see if I get this   If drives are connected to the controller directly, they get the most out of the drive's speed directly.  It's only when you use an expander, that will split the bandwidth (if that is what we call it), and in old controllers, use the speed of the slowest device, will using an H330 benefit, since it has that LSI technology.

Almost, with the H330 or another SAS3008 based card to get the full speed while using slower disks you need an expander that supports DataBold (aka an LSI 12Gbit SAS expander) 

 

if you use a expander that does not support databold and you connect a bunch of 6Gbit (sas or sata) and 12Gbit SAS all will run at the slow speed

Edited January 19, 20197 yr by LammeN3rd

hahaha, it's truly tricky 😁  I hope I can somehow comprehend this when the time comes for me to upgrade

check https://www.tweaktown.com/news/34010/lsi-introduces-12gb-s-sas-megaraid-controllers-and-databolt-expanders/index.html for more info on databold

37 minutes ago, mbc0 said:

BUT if I use an expander on that PERC H330 then I will only get the performance speed of the lowest drive...

Yes, if you use a SAS1/2 expander or a non LSI SAS3 expander.

still, thanks @LammeN3rd and @johnnie.black!

5 hours ago, LammeN3rd said:

check https://www.tweaktown.com/news/34010/lsi-introduces-12gb-s-sas-megaraid-controllers-and-databolt-expanders/index.html for more info on databold

Better yet, get your tech info first-hand: From LSI (white paper on Databolt)

[to borrow an old Unix joke: "Use the source, Luke."]

This paper also gives a good overview on expanders.

 

Oh, as for the queried controller in the OP ... if Chiney-fakes weren't bad enough, this one must also be avoided on moral grounds. To make such a denigrating reference/inference on the most innovative and impactful OS is pure blasphemy ... Unicaca ... feh!!!!

Quote

Just wondering if anyone has had any luck running a Unicaca SAS 3008 ...

 

Thanks for the link. Indeed, this paper gives a good explanation of what is the limit of each device, lanes. Thanks for pointing this out.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Does this mean when using Dell H330 with SAS 6Gb drives, I'll see significant performance improvement against my existing H310, with SATA 2 and 3 drives when copying data from Cache (SSD) to Array?  My reasoning is SAS 6GB capable of 230 MBps while SATA spin drives can only do 100-170 MBps only?