New member of 'HBA' card user club..

[Tigersharke]

I just finished switching from a generic (likely made in China) cheap RAID card to a proper Host Bus Adapter card. The one I chose is https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DSURZYS and was a simple matter of swapping cards and re-connecting the new HBA to SATA cables. I have nine hard drives, so one (the first one I believe) is still attached to the motherboard SATA socket, as are my SSDs and DVD drive. The other eight HDDs are all comfortably humming with the new card. If I had fewer drives, they'd all be handled by the HBA, I cannot add another HBA unless I were to switch from an intel ethernet card to the realtek ethernet on the motherboard which I'd rather not.

The first boot took a few extra moments for the "BIOS" on the motherboard to recognize where the boot drive was and possibly to adopt the new HBA card.

 

[sretalla]

What about an expander card?... they have some that don't use a PCI slot. Your HBA is capable of controlling over 100 HDDs, so why not let it take more?

 

[Tigersharke]

Thats news to me, would that mean different adapter cables? If all it takes are the cables which would be 6 SATA each, then that'd be easy.. I know nothing of expander cards.

 

[sretalla]

Something like this: https://www.ixsystems.com/community...ro-x10-sri-f-xeon-e5-1650v4.46262/post-409299

I haven't done a lot of searching, but I'm sure there's an equivalent for SAS3.

 

[Tigersharke]

What I've come across which may be nearly the same runs about $300 which is quite a lot primarily for one HDD, though all four SATA devices would be satisfied. I also looked for Mini SAS to SATA cables greater than 1 to 4, and none seem to exist.

 

[sretalla]

I guess it would only make sense if you need a lot more ports... good to keep in mind in future.

Indeed there are no breakout cables that do more than 4 SATA from a SAS port. But you can send a single SAS cable to an expander and run many breakout cables from it.

 

[Tigersharke]

The only other option is a pci card that had 3 SAS ports even though that may also be overkill given how potent each port is.

Such a pity they do not really market HBA tech to the average consumer. If only Microsoft were to adopt ZFS, there would be a little more influence to avoid the usual RAID cards, but that also assumes Microsoft truly understood ZFS to make such a push.

 

[jgreco]

Thats news to me, would that mean different adapter cables?

SHAME on you. You should be taking advantage of the things available here on the forum.

https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-sas-sy-a-primer-on-basic-sas-and-sata.26145/

 

[Tigersharke]

Yeah.. It was done sort of on a whim. Too much time sitting around.

Also figured I may as well, since I had a weird temporary failed drive. I had removed it booted back up to be certain I didn't then have two detached drives, but it told me resilvering and showed I believe no errors. Either I had removed the correct drive or there was nothing actually wrong. I put the drive back as it had been, rebooted a second time and it eventually finished resilvering, no errors at all now. I did recall seeing 32 checksum errors indicated for a drive at one point, then 8 later on, but I wasn't ever sure which drive it had been or if it were two different drives. Around the same time it seemed that my power supply was running its fan a bit more often than it had, so I have also replaced that, went from 1080 to 1200 watt. Everything is humming the way it should now. If anything happens to a HDD, I do have two spares to replace in their shipping boxes not yet used.