HBA card with external SAS port recommendations

[Russell Coight]

Hello,

I'm looking for recommendations for a SAS HBA that has external ports.

We have an unused HP DL360 G5 that we would like to use as a FreeNAS server. It will connect to an unused disk enclosure hence the need for external SAS ports.

The enclosure has 12 x 1TB drives with 2 SAS ports. Ideally we would like 2 cards with 1 port for some redundancy. If there is a suitable card that has one port so we can get 2, it will need to be half height and come with a full height and half height bracket as the DL360 has one half height and one full height slot.

Here's one card I came across that we can get relatively easily, apologies for the PDF:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/s...rking/6gb-sas-pcie-hba-external-ds-186803.pdf

It uses a LSI2008 chipset, from what I've read this chipset will work but I need to flash it to IT mode? Can this card be flashed? Although it has 2 ports it's still an option, will probably just go with one of these.

There isn't a big budget for this, already have the cables though.

thanks

 

[Ericloewe]

In principle, any LSI SAS 2008/2308 card can be flashed to IT mode.

Any card with these controllers will do (and they'll all have 8 channels and thus 2 ports). If the ports are internal, cheap passive adapters can convert internal cabling to external cabling.

Don't worry about redundancy - if it fails, you can get any HBA with enough ports and FreeNAS won't complain.

 

[Russell Coight]

Will I need 2 of these cards to support 12 drives? I assume it's one channel per drive?

 

[Ericloewe]

Will I need 2 of these cards to support 12 drives? I assume it's one channel per drive?

If your external enclosure already has an expander, even one channel would suffice, and it should be able to easily take 4 via one connector (maybe even 8 via two connectors). If the drives are simply exposed directly, you'd need either an SAS expander or a second controller or a 16-channel controller. I believe all options end up costing similar amounts of cash.

 

[Russell Coight]

If your external enclosure already has an expander, even one channel would suffice, and it should be able to easily take 4 via one connector (maybe even 8 via two connectors). If the drives are simply exposed directly, you'd need either an SAS expander or a second controller or a 16-channel controller. I believe all options end up costing similar amounts of cash.

I'm a bit out of my depth here. The enclosure is an MSA2000 12 slot 3.5" which at the moment is paired with an MSA2324fc, we will only be using the enclosure though. Can this even be connected directly to FreeNAS?

I found this thread about an MSA2000, not sure our scenarios are the same though.

From this thread I found:

If it is simply a disk shelf, it should be fine. If there's an actual controller in the shelf, that might be a problem.

I'm not even sure how to go about finding out if it has a controller or not, I'm thinking not becuase the MSA2324 has a controller. Also not sure how to go about finding out if the shelf has a SAS expander or not.

User guide if it might be of some help.

 

[Ericloewe]

I'm having a hard time figuring out what exactly it has, but the illustrations suggest it's an SAS expander. It could be they're running some proprietary crap similar to SAS (ripped-off from SAS), but the exact determination requires a bit more research.

 

[jgreco]

I am pretty sure it is a full shelf and controller combo. I was looking at this kind of solution for DAS VM storage awhile back. Cannot say if it could be bludgeoned into a state compatible with FreeNAS (direct disk access) but in the worst case I believe it can be made to work as a bunch of independent RAID0 disks which you would need to monitor the health of using the array's tools.