HBA vs motherboard SATA

[paulinventome]

So I've been working my way through docs but haven't been able to find a specific answer to this.

I'm thinking of a self build rather than buy another Synology.

From a performance and safety view what's the difference between a PCI HBA and a motherboard with 8 SATA connections if they are just plugging into spinning disks? A motherboard will be a more cost effective route.

I am planning on an 8 disc main volume but also a PCI based NVMe volume as a fast online temporary store (footage and editing), the PC would be running 10gbe so the NVMe should saturate that easily...

Thanks
Paul

 

[sretalla]

From a performance and safety view what's the difference between a PCI HBA and a motherboard with 8 SATA connections if they are just plugging into spinning disks? A motherboard will be a more cost effective route.

With a few caveats, Motherboard SATA is perfectly fine to host any SATA capable disk.

Watch out for Motherboard SATA controllers that offer RAID settings (either put them in AHCI mode or avoid the ports assigned to RAID with ZFS disks).

There are some older Marvel SATA controller chips that are known to be less reliable, but those are rare to find on new boards now.

Also watch out for controllers that share ports with M.2 SATA ports... nothing bad as such, but you need to ensure you don't plan on using both an M.2 in SATA mode and the linked SATA port at the same time.

 

[paulinventome]

With a few caveats, Motherboard SATA is perfectly fine to host any SATA capable disk.

Watch out for Motherboard SATA controllers that offer RAID settings (either put them in AHCI mode or avoid the ports assigned to RAID with ZFS disks).

There are some older Marvel SATA controller chips that are known to be less reliable, but those are rare to find on new boards now.

Thanks for the confirmation.

Back to juggling CPUs and motherboards now...