Sata Expansion Card

[usopkhan]

Hi guys, would appreciate some help on sata cards.

I recently ran out of sata ports on my motherboard, I guess a PCIe sata card would be an option.
I tried looking around and found these options below -

https://shopee.com.my/ACASIS-8-Port-PCIe-Expansion-SATA-Card-to-5-8-10-Ports-6-Gbps-SATA-3.0-PCIe-Card-PCIe-to-SATA-Controller-Expansion-Card-i.10245002.5591770339?position=6

or

https://shopee.com.my/Cablecc-LSIMegaRAID-SAS-LSI-9260-8i-LSI00198-8-port-512MB-cache-SFF8087-6Gb-RAID0-1-5-6-PCI-E-2-0-X8-Controller-Card-i.32465486.9436390150?gclid=CjwKCAjwj8eJBhA5EiwAg3z0mzbIbRnre9l8yoFwuiMh_MHU0ysHUz71SXFrdSr2wS9M5MjKKYYT7RoCppIQAvD_BwE

which one should i get..? or is there any other options..? Thanking you guys in advance.

FreeNAS-11.3-U3.2
Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G3250 @ 3.20GHz
32 GB RAM
ASUS VANGUARD B85 - motherboard - micro ATX - LGA1150 Socket
1 x PCIe 3.0 x16
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode)
1 x PCIe 2.0 x1
1 x PCI

 

[Ericloewe]

which one should i get..?

Neither. To quote the Quick Hardware Guide:

The only reliable way of adding SATA or SAS ports to a system is with LSI SAS HBAs (and SAS
expanders, if at least one controller is present).
Any card using the SAS2008, SAS2308 or SAS3008 controller will work, but some may need to
be crossflashed to IT mode to operate as HBAs and not entry-level RAID cards. This includes
rebadged cards from other vendors – although Dell cards are somewhat trickier to crossflash.

That means you need something like an LSI SAS 9201, 9207 or 9300.

 

[usopkhan]

thanks bro. Appreciate it. Anything u suggest that is budget friendly..? on the cheaper side...i am only using sata drives for now.. thanks

 

[sretalla]

Anything u suggest that is budget friendly..? on the cheaper side

I see plenty of posts around which say those can be easily found on ebay, etc, for $50 or less.

 

[usopkhan]

I see plenty of posts around which say those can be easily found on ebay, etc, for $50 or less.

Thank You

 

[Rakrul]

I found myself running out of SATA ports as well and thinking of purchasing a LBI SAS 9211 (which I believe is the same as 9201?) card. I was wondering if I should move all existing drives to the expansion card along with the new drive or doesn't it matter?

 

[Ericloewe]

The SAS 9201 is a 16-port card and the SAS 9211 is an 8-port card, but otherwise they're pretty much the same feature-wise.

 

[Yorick]

should move all existing drives to the expansion card along with the new drive or doesn't it matter?

That doesn’t matter. ZFS as implemented in TrueNAS doesn’t care which controllers the drives are on, as long as those controllers are reliable and HBA. Your motherboard SATA ports are both of those things. Some nuances such as “always use AHCI mode not RAID mode” for SATA ports, and I suppose there are models out there that aren’t reliable. But you’d have noticed that by now, if they weren’t.

 

[jgreco]

Here's a bunch of potentially helpful information about SAS controllers:

Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy ... a primer on basic SAS and SATA

With the introduction of SAS 12Gbps, seems like "it's time" to do a braindump on SAS. Work in progress, as usual. History By the late '90's, SCSI and PATA were the dominant technologies to attach disks. Both were parallel bus multiple drop...

www.truenas.com

And also why you don't want to use that LSI 9260:

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

 

[Rakrul]

That doesn’t matter. ZFS as implemented in TrueNAS doesn’t care which controllers the drives are on, as long as those controllers are reliable and HBA. Your motherboard SATA ports are both of those things. Some nuances such as “always use AHCI mode not RAID mode” for SATA ports, and I suppose there are models out there that aren’t reliable. But you’d have noticed that by now, if they weren’t.

Thanks for the clarification. Since I didn't use the TrueNAS Community Hardware Guide to the dot, I went with a cheaper mobo and AMD CPU so I was thinking maybe the SAS controller is better than the one on the mobo, but this might just be theoretical at this point?

 

[jgreco]

HBAs tend to be a bit slower than mainboard SATA ports, because there's another CPU involved handling the data. On the other hand, unlike the mainboard ports, an HBA can handle dozens or even hundreds of drives through the use of expanders.