Looking for PCIe SATA card

[Michael Woodson]

I am looking to add on to my unraid server with room to grow and looking for something with an excellent track record of reliability. Willing to pay more for that quality. I didn't expect the search to be so hard.

 

I currently have this motherboard:

 

https://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/h97m pro4/  the card will go into the PCI Express 2.0 x16 Slot (PCIE2: x4 mode) slot.

 

I have found this card, which seems like a good option: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082D6XSZN/ref=ox_sc_act_title_4?smid=A1MK2DD7C33I65&th=1 . I uses "the Marvell 88SE9215 + JMicron JMB5xx chip".

 

I will likely add at at least 4 more drives over the next 2 years.

 

Any Advice?

 

Thank you,

Edited October 6, 2020 by Michael Woodson

[Hoopster]

26 minutes ago, Michael Woodson said:

I am looking to add on to my unraid server with room to grow and looking for something with an excellent track record of reliability

Don't get anything with a Marvell chipset.  They are very problematic with latest Linux kernel versions; may work, may not but not worth the risk.

 

Preferred cards have an LSI/Broadcom chipset.  Some ASMedia (2 port) and JMicron (4 or 5 port) based cards also work well.

 

There is a JMicron card that has 5 ports that some in these forums use.  It uses the JMB585 chipset.

 

Since you only need a PCIe 2.0 card, there are many good LSI-based options you can pick up quite inexpensively on eBay.  Many of us are using these cards with great success as they are pulled from decommissioned servers.  I have a Dell H310 like the one in this link.  This is from a very reputable seller and is pre-flashed to IT mode.

 

The H310 is basically an LSI 9211-8i and uses the same firmware.  Another good clone is the IBM M1015.  The chipset all three use is the LSI SAS 2008.

 

EDIT:  The above mentioned LSI cards are all 8-port cards.

Edited October 6, 2020 by Hoopster

[Hoopster]

The Dell H200 is another good option.  Is basically the same as the H310 except with the SFF-8087 port on the top of the card instead of the back of the card.  Also uses LSI SAS2008 chipset.

[Michael Woodson]

This is excellent information! I hadn't considered SFF-8087 ports.

 

How many SATA drives can this support per SFF-8087 port? It looks like 4 drives per port?!! I'm not sure that slot has the bandwidth for 8 drives.

 

Do I need to do anything to upgrade or configure the card? What exactly is IT mode?

Thank you!

[Hoopster]

7 minutes ago, Michael Woodson said:

 

How many SATA drives can this support per SFF-8087 port?

4 per port using SFF-8087 to SATA forward breakout cables like these.  Note: reverse breakout cables look the same but will not work. 

 

18 minutes ago, Michael Woodson said:

I'm not sure that slot has the bandwidth for 8 drives.

PCIe 2.0 provides a bandwidth of 500 MB/s or ~4000 MB/s for 8 PCIe lanes.  With overhead, realistically you can expect no more than 400 MB/s per PCIe lane.  If you plan to use this in a x16 slot running at x4, your total available bandwidth would be about 1600 MB/s.  If you have 8 drives connected to the card, that is 200 MB/s in the rare case where all 8 drives are active (like a parity check).  For HDDs, 200 MB/s is plenty as you will never see that on a sustained basis.  The highest MB/s on a parity check I have ever seen is around 175-180 MB/s on my 8TB drives and this at the fastest part of the disk read.

 

Only SSDs would be hindered by the 200 or 400 MB/s per PCIe lane but you do not want to attach SATA SSDs to these cards anyway as they do not support TRIM operations.  Always attach SSDs to the motherboard SATA ports.

 

19 minutes ago, Michael Woodson said:

What exactly is IT mode?

IT mode is a firmware mode that allows each attached disk to be seen as a separate disk rather than as a disk in a RAID array.  LSI pure HBA cards are in this mode by default but most server cards like the Dells and IBM I mentioned come with RAID firmware installed by default.  You don't want this with unRAID so flashing the firmware to IT mode is necessary.  If you are uncomfortable doing this, it is best to buy a card already cross-flashed to IT mode like the ones I linked.

[Michael Woodson]

I have received and set up one of the Dell H200s. I have 2x new 10TB drives, which I would like to make both parity drives for the array and add the current parity 8TB drive back as a normal array disk. What is the best procedure to do this safely and smoothly?

 

Is this guide still relevant?

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/The_parity_swap_procedure

 

Thank you!