I am playing with the idea of buying a PCIe SAS Controller card for my Lenovo ThinkStation P710, in order to create a secondary cache pool tiered between the existing NVME SSD's and the array, which consists of Seagate EXO's SATA drives. I know next to nothing about SAS so i would like some advise regarding controller cards.

 

My primary reason for buying this is for learning purposes. I only need to support a maximum of 4 SAS drives. Speed is going to be the most important aspect, i can see that both 6GB/s and 12GB/s controllers exists, so i am oviously leaning towards 12GB/s. I have been looking at LSI SAS 9311-8i, i can find a lot of these cheap on eBay from China, i am always sceptical of buying things from China, do fakes of these exist? Do you have any recommendations regarding other models or brands?

 

I really appreciate all help 

 

1 hour ago, baunegaard said:

I only need to support a maximum of 4 SAS drives. Speed is going to be the most important aspect,

If only connect 4 disks or expect SAS spinnder disk provide extreme performance, then you probably waste your money.

 

The interesting of SAS was it can connect many device with expander, and design allow long link distance. ( also some advance feature )

 

If future plan have external device, then 4i4e should consider instead of 8i. On the other hand, does card come with full/half PCIe bracket also important.

Edited October 8, 20205 yr by Vr2Io

3 minutes ago, Vr2Io said:

If only connect 4 disks or expect SAS spinnder disk provide extreme performance, then you probably waste your money.

 

The interesting of SAS was it can connect many device with expander, and design allow long link distance. ( also some advance feature )

 

If future plan have external device, then 4i4e should consider instead of 8i. On the other hand, does card come with full/half PCIe bracket also important.

I see SAS drives comes with higher rpm and i have read that the SCSI protocol performs better with multiple writes, so i want to play with them as a second tier cache. I cannot say that i wont use it to expand in the future, the posibility is nice to have. What is the difference on 4i, 8i and 16i? I need full PCIe bracket.

22 minutes ago, baunegaard said:

What is the difference on 4i, 8i and 16i?

"i" means internal connecter and "e" means external connector. 4,8,16 is how many port provide.

Edited October 8, 20205 yr by Vr2Io

It is quite complicated to understand at first but I saw 2 videos from Art of Server that do a good job explaining this.

The different board types, the connectors, etc :

 

 

 

and the cables :

 

 

Edited October 9, 20205 yr by ChatNoir