8 drive system, single or dual HBA?

Tekkie

Patron
Joined
May 31, 2011
Messages
353
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

Guru
Joined
Oct 23, 2020
Messages
719
I'm running my 8 HDD from a single LSI SAS2308 and get full speed on all disks.
 

beagle

Explorer
Joined
Jun 15, 2020
Messages
91
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

Patron
Joined
May 31, 2011
Messages
353
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

Explorer
Joined
Jun 15, 2020
Messages
91
I'm not sure you will see much difference using HDDs, maybe with SSDs.
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
Moderator
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
20,194
The only sane decision is to save 7-10 W of power consumption and use a single HBA.
 
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