does my Raid card need flashing for Unraid? 03X3834 IBM LSI 6GB 16 PORT PCI-E SAS EXPANDER CARD 9240-8i 9261-8i 11407-1

[soja]

1 minute ago, comet424 said:

oh so play it by ear and then re ask when I get one right..

so if a backplane has 2  then  u want a card with 2  

if the backplane has 4 then you want a card with 4

 

so when they state  8i or 16i  that's really    2 SAS ports equaling 8 SATA  = 8i   and 4SAS ports equals 16 SATA  = 16i   is that how that works

 

 

Yes sorta.

 

8i = 2 x4 SAS ports that are meant to break out into 8 total SAS ports for drives. The cards typically support many more disks through expanders(256 in your case and I have seen up to 1024). When you use a bunch of expanders obviously you sacrifice total bandwidth for each drive but spinning disks don't run anywhere near the maximum SAS speed anyway. If you have an extremely large array or are using many SSDs you would want to consider a 16i or two 8i controllers to keep the available bandwidth high.

 

For the backplane, expander cards are very common. I have an IBM SystemX 3650 M3 that has 16 2.5 inch drive bays and the server has a built in spot for the SAS expander. Unless you are planning a very high performance array stick with the cheaper option of a very common HBA/Raid card in HBA mode and a SAS expander.

[comet424]

oh ok  ya I don't deal with this stuff everyday so I learn here and there and 20 yrs ago when I was hardcore in computer gaming etc  didn't see half this stuff then lol..  

ya I currently just expanding my 2tb drives to 12TB drives when I can afford  and keep the 2s but currently using 8 drives  as my lsi card only came with 8 cables...  learn something new everyday

 

I bought the wrong card  as you noticed  as I got given to me an old  IBM SystemX 3650 orginal  not the Ms  so it has a 3gb/s at SAS or 1.5 for sata.. and I tested with my LSI card  and found its a pass through backplane  figured it was stuck at 1.5  but I got 6gb/s drives working and copying at 110mbs   on my 7200 drives...  its a 6 bay.. I wanna use it as a back up server.. not sure if its fast enough to do anything else..  dual cpu…  sucks usb and booting past IBM server raid takes forever  cant disable it.. and I wanted to see if I could upgrade the motherboard  as I wanted faster and not junk the case..  but im stuck  with it  but it should be good for back up server...

 

and id like maximum speed if I could get it either in ZFS  or I wanted for my Plex  as I find it buffers  on the network...  would like ssDs for my video collection but it not cost effective  sSDs  way too expensive if I wanted to have 20+TBs  of backed up dvds home videos etc

 

[soja]

2 minutes ago, comet424 said:

oh ok  ya I don't deal with this stuff everyday so I learn here and there and 20 yrs ago when I was hardcore in computer gaming etc  didn't see half this stuff then lol..  

ya I currently just expanding my 2tb drives to 12TB drives when I can afford  and keep the 2s but currently using 8 drives  as my lsi card only came with 8 cables...  learn something new everyday

 

I bought the wrong card  as you noticed  as I got given to me an old  IBM SystemX 3650 orginal  not the Ms  so it has a 3gb/s at SAS or 1.5 for sata.. and I tested with my LSI card  and found its a pass through backplane  figured it was stuck at 1.5  but I got 6gb/s drives working and copying at 110mbs   on my 7200 drives...  its a 6 bay.. I wanna use it as a back up server.. not sure if its fast enough to do anything else..  dual cpu…  sucks usb and booting past IBM server raid takes forever  cant disable it.. and I wanted to see if I could upgrade the motherboard  as I wanted faster and not junk the case..  but im stuck  with it  but it should be good for back up server...

 

and id like maximum speed if I could get it either in ZFS  or I wanted for my Plex  as I find it buffers  on the network...  would like ssDs for my video collection but it not cost effective  sSDs  way too expensive if I wanted to have 20+TBs  of backed up dvds home videos etc

 

Plex buffering is probably other things. Most 1080p movies are 20Mb/s or less and even SAS gen 1 is 3Gb/s. SAS gen 2 is 6Gb/s and there are faster revisions. Look into network bottlenecks(wifi?) and if you are writing heavily to the array a lot look into a cache drive for writes so you don't interrupt movie watching randomly.

 

I love the old x3650 workhorses. They use too much power for the performance you get out of them but as a backup box they should be perfectly fine. 

[comet424]

what I found is I was fast forwarding some tv shows I had  to get to the end  to jump ahead  if I did it a few times  buffering would sit 10 min buffering  and nothing happen id have to back out then back and usually fixed it

don't use wifi I find wifi always unreliable.. so its just dedicated 1gb/s nic

I did add a cache..  but I took it off I found when I was copying a lot of files the 500gb or 1tb I was transferring would fill up and then unraid kept giving me errors ur full ur full basically lol then did the mover to move files..  and then I read  using ssds to write a lot your wear out the drive a lot.. you really only wanna read  and to keep hard dirves for writing too..  even though ssds are nice and fast to write too.. and since I cant afford a lot I don't 100% goto ssds as I didn't wanna wear them out didn't have money to replace them since they only live soo long..  I know I burned out usb on my pfsense when I was running it off it  it bricked after a while  as it was logging and I guess I wore it out in a month lol

 

ya the fans are noisy as heck I guess the amount of fans on it is because the cpu heat sink has no fan..  I guess u cant had one and elimate the fans...  but I do like it its big  and heavy oh my..  I dunno if they can run VMS  as I dunno if you had hyper threading or vm cpus in like 2006  my friend told me to run VMware esxi  and well software said computer too old basically lol