I have a mixture of 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB drives all equaling to 66TB. Stuck right now using 8TB because I'm using 2 8TB parity drives. So that leaves me with having to use three HD controllers to support all those drives. Using 3 SuperMicro Addon Cards. Each supporting 8 drives. I eventually want to increase my parity drives to 12TB and ditch the 2TB drives with larger ones or just remove them from the array all together. I'm trying to eliminate the use of three controllers and wondered what everyone else is using for their drives that have a large array. I'm getting tired of not being able to watch a simple movie. And all the unraid system acts as is a NAS. No dockers, no VM's. I've stripped down my server to the bare necessities right now to make it easy to troubleshoot, but figured if I had two controllers it would be able to troubleshoot and find mainboards I can test with.

 

So, if you have a large array holding 10+ drives can you list what controller you are using? I have to start replacing hardware for troubleshooting. Thanks.

 

you can replace one of your 8 port controllers with  LSI SAS 9201-16i, or you can use SAS Expander like Intel RES2SV240 and connect it to one of your LSI card.

My array is a lot smaller, capacity wise, than yours, but I use an MD1000 I picked up off ebay and an LSI 9201-16e. I connect it and the drive enclosure with a SAS cable (SFF-8088 to 8064). The setup works wonderfully and I have 15 hot swap 3.5" bays with redundant power supplies and EMM's. Unraid recognized the drives right away (after I flashed the card). Plus, I only use one of the four ports on the card for the enclosure. 

 

Oh and the card was 20 bucks shipped and the enclosure was 180 shipped with drive caddies, two power supplies and two EMMs plus a front bezel with key (hey the little things count).

Edited April 23, 20197 yr by HSEDuster