DL380 G9 HBA

[Strange Rover]

I am now playing with an HP DL380 G9 lff 12 bay server and need to sort an HBA before I can go further.

My question is which HBA should I use? I'd like to use 12gbps and the backplane has 3 SAS connectors whilst most HBAs have 2, is there an HBA that would give me the 3 SAS connections I need and is OK to use with TrueNAS or do I need to go with an LSI HBA with 2 SAS connectors and use a SAS expander?

 

[NugentS]

What disks do you plan on using?
LSI's come in 2 connectors (-8i) or 4 connectors (16-i)

 

[Strange Rover]

I'm thinking of using a set of 12 Toshiba 12TB Enterprise drives. I'm also thinking of using either SATA M.2 SSDs or NVME SSDs on PCI cards to give me a fusion pool.

 

[NugentS]

The LSI 9200's are cheap(ish), but they are a bit slow for SSD's (lots), fine for a few
The LSI 9300's are not cheap but better for pools of SATA/SAS SSD's
The -16i cards are quite expensive
I have never seen an HBA with 3 ports - so you need either 4, or 2*2, or 1*2+Expander. All with the right firmware

The bad news is that fakes are quite common. Most cautious people buy cards from system dismantlers or The Art of Server (on ebay)

 

[dxun]

The conventional wisdom so far is that anything better than an LSI 9200 series (i.e. LSI 2008 CPU) is an overkill for HDD-only arrays. You shouldn't be testing the limits of that HBA with an array of even these speedy enterprise drives. As an example, consider the LSI 2008 caps out at 290 k IOPS; what kind of a HDD-only array would you need to have to even come close to these numbers and under which conditions?

With SSDs, the situation obviously changes but for HDD-only arrays - unless going extreme densities (which 12 drives, I think isn't) - you should be more than fine with an LSI 9200.

BTW, I can also recommend The Art of Server as a great source of LSI HBA. You can count not only on the origins of the card but also on technical assistance and advice.