30-drive setup, which low-profile HBAs?


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Hey all,

 

I'm building a new server on 10th gen intel (chassis: Supermicro CSE-847, mobo: Supermicro X12SCA-F) and due to the chassis / motherboard, I have the following contraints:

 

  • Must be low-profile
  • Mobo only has 2x PCIe x8 slots, 1x PCIe x4

 

Which HBA would people recommend for this build that would work in Unraid?

 

I currently have older M1015 (9240-8i), but I'd be maxed at 16 drives and no PCIe slots left on the motherboard. So i'd like to buy 1 (or 2 if speeds would improve) new HBAs to support up to 30 drives in this new build.

 

Thanks!

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I actually haven't bought the case yet, but I have 2 I could buy, one older chassis (now discontinued) with the SAS2 backplane and a newer one with SAS3, the SAS3 one is obviously significantly more.

 

I guess I'm worried about 1 HBA @ 6Gbps being a bottleneck for 24-30 drives.

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...this will depend on the UseCase and your Infrastructure.

Where will be the bottleneck, at a 6Gbps Backplane link (how many drives being in active read/write at the same time? - depending on the Drive going at 1.25Gpbs if a good performance drive) or the client link(s) (the X12SCA-F only has one 1Gbps + one 2.5Gbps NIC, which sums up to max 3.5Gbps)?

 

With 2 Backplanes and 2 HBAs you could split data and parity disk(s) - also across shares.

Or go for the SAS3 version of the case/Backplane and a 12Gbps HBA (like a LSI/Broadcom-3008...you just need one 8i version, one SFF-Link per Backplane).

 

Since the X12SCA-F supports 2x NVMe@PCIe-x4, this is where the real data in/out should occur and the mover can take its time later?

With a 1TB NVMe going so cheap (like the Patriot Viper VPN100), maybe this is another option?

But depending on your UseCase....

 

Edit: also check, that the NICs on this 10thgen MB are supported at all, see: 

 

Edited by Ford Prefect
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First, thank you so much for your time and replies today, very much appreciated! I haven't built a server in 6-7 years.

 

You're right, I would be using 2x NVME (1TB) where the writes would occur and the mover would just move the data 1-2 times a day.

 

The drives I plan to put in are all Seagate Exos X16  (16TB), so about 384-576TB of space, 2 drives dedicated to parity.

 

I guess I'm concerned about parity checks/rebuilds/etc. As long as I can hit 100MB/s across all drives during a parity check, we're looking at about 48 hours to do a parity rebuild.

 

My use cases are pretty simple - nothing high throughput, about 1-2TB of transfer per day being moved to the array from the NVMe - regular scheduled parity checks.

 

I was also looking at this thread, specifically the image that has 1 LSI 2008 connected to 24 drives, which shows a max of 95MB/s I think (if that's correct).

 

Cheers,

 

 

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Yes, you are right...I actually did not have to make a parity rebuild for years (wish me luck) and totaly missed that usecase ;-)

 

Intersing find...according to the other link: 

 

According to the data in the link, connecting two ports of the same HBA does help (I did a test with mine, when I did build it and did not see a difference, but did not test parity-rebuilds at that time).

 

So, with 16TB disks, this is introducing a severe risk of failure of more drives during these 48hrs, SAS3 is the only way to go in order to reduce risks then, isn't it?

 

Edit: the SAS3 backplanes can be found at "the bay" for around 100bucks each, most sellers offer a replacement/swap of SAS2 for SAS3 backplanes as well....definitely not a bargain.

Edited by Ford Prefect
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