Recommendations for non-LSI HBAs? Or HBAs that don't overheat without active cooling?

[rvassar]

Substantially improved? A Seagate Barracuda ST32550N (7200 RPM) was seeking at about 8ms. Seagate claims a "3.4/3.8" rating for their last 15K drive. To my mind, that's "double, maybe" for rotation, "half, maybe" for seek. Thirty years. To my mind, that's not a substantial improvement in that time period.

That's 4x IOPS at full seek, and more if you don't do full seek. Coupled with much smarter FW running on faster controllers with larger caches... There's all kinds of optimization possible now that didn't exist 30 years ago. But they're still mechanical devices, Moore's law doesn't apply directly to them.

 

[HoneyBadger]

@HoneyBadger that memory recall is very impressive . The case is a Silverstone DS380:

The motherboard is a mini-ITX one with only one PCI slot which is positioned at the lower of the two PCI brackets of the chassis. The upper bracket is unoccupied, and that's how I had space to mount a small fan on top of the LSI heatsink. As you can imagine, the fan blew air straight into the PSU. I don't know whether the chassis has enough airflow. I read the DS380 wasn't particularly good with cooling the HDDs, but there is a workaround I'm fine with. I don't know whether it will do good with supplying sufficient airflow to the HBA.

Ah. Yes, the DS380 has some challenges with HDD cooling - some users have either 3D-printed ducting or used cardboard/plastic to force airflow over the drives, but this doesn't address the "gap" over the PCIe slot area ( https://blog.briancmoses.com/2017/04/creating-a-cooling-duct-for-the-silverstone-ds380.html )

The small clearance to the PSU also means you'd be fighting that larger fan for air. It's a shame there aren't more options for straight-through cooling PSUs - SeaSonic's SSP-600ES2 might be a viable option here that will pull air in from the "front" and exhaust out a rear 80mm fan, although this might add some noise vs. a 120/140mm PSU.

Is there perhaps room to mount a fan on a bracket above the HBA, blowing down?

[Mod Hat On]

As fun as it is to go off on tangents about the future of SATA, SAS, and NVMe, let's not derail @rdfreak 's thread too hard, shall we?

[/Mod Hat Off]