8 drive system, single or dual HBA?

[Tekkie]

Hi there,

Recently my 2TB and 4TB drives (6-12+ years old) started throwing bad sectors so I decided to replace all the drives with 10TB Ironwolf NAS drives and I need some advice on how to best connect these.

My old system ran 2 x 7 drive Z3 pools and I used 2 LSI HBAs to attach all those drives, my new system is a 8 drive Z3 pool and my question is what is the best way to attach these drives? Do I split them across the HBAs and the MB SATA, do I put all 8 drives on a single HBA, does it even matter?

My system is built around an AMD FX-8370E Eight-Core Processor with 32GB RAM, running Core 13.0-U6.

 

[LarsR]

I'm running my 8 HDD from a single LSI SAS2308 and get full speed on all disks.

 

[beagle]

If the HBA you are using is the one on your signature (SAS9211-8I), according to Broadcom documentation it supports eight internal 6Gb/s and provides two x4 internal mini-SAS connectors (SFF-8087).

Therefore, you could use 2 SAS split cables to connect 4 HDDs to each port of a single controller.

 

[Tekkie]

I'm running my 8 HDD from a single LSI SAS2308 and get full speed on all disks.

Would splitting the drives across the HBAs do anything in terms of performance?

 

[beagle]

I'm not sure you will see much difference using HDDs, maybe with SSDs.

 

[danb35]

does it even matter?

Nope.

 

[Ericloewe]

The only sane decision is to save 7-10 W of power consumption and use a single HBA.