SATA HBA Recommendation

[ninjai]

Hey All,

My NAS is pretty old at this point, I'm running a Supermicro X10SLL-F Xeon E3 LGA1150 DDR3 ECC C222 6SATA 3PCIE IPMI 2GBE mATX Motherboard. I have 6x4TB disks in RAIDZ2.

I need to replace a couple disks so since my motherboard is capped for SATA ports I was thinking of getting an HBA to support more disks so I can put the OS on a SATA disk instead of a flash drive, and a new RAIDZ1 array for crap I don't really care about but would be annoying at best if I had to regather it.

What kind of HBA would be supported and work with this motherboard? I'm not sure what the recommended hardware would be.

I'm running the latest TrueNAS SCALE right now.

Thank you!

 

[demon]

Pretty much anybody who's not out of their mind will suggest you get an LSI SAS HBA at this point. Probably something like an LSI SAS 9300-8i. Most SATA PCIe add-in cards use cheap Silicon Image, Marvell or other SATA controllers, which tend to be flaky.

You could also go with an LSI 9207-8i, you can get some pretty good deals on them, but keep in mind that they use MiniSAS (SFF-8087) connectors, while the 9300 and 9400 boards use HD-MiniSAS (SFF-8643) connectors, and those are not interchangeable.

 

[jgreco]

at this point.

For values of "at this point" equaling "at any time in the history of this project".

If you really only need one or two additional ports, the main problem with an HBA is the extra watt burn. HBA's will consume about 10-15 watts all on their own; they are a small computer with an embedded processor and they actively run code. You CAN probably add an AHCI compliant controller for a few more ports, but most of the ones that offer more than four ports are actually SATA port multipliers. Make sure you read

Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers

In the last year or two, we've had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use port multipliers, and use cheap SATA controllers only after extensive research. SATA controllers and SATA...

www.truenas.com

If you do decide to go down the HBA path but are unfamiliar with SAS, please have a run-thru of

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 topologies and this kind of sucked. SATA and Serial...

www.truenas.com

as well.

 

[ninjai]

But doesn't SAS use a different connector than SATA? How would that work?

 

[jgreco]

But doesn't SAS use a different connector than SATA? How would that work?

If you do decide to go down the HBA path but are unfamiliar with SAS, please have a run-thru of

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 topologies and this kind of sucked. SATA and Serial...

www.truenas.com

as well.

 

[demon]

But doesn't SAS use a different connector than SATA? How would that work?

You connect to the drives with a fanout cable. Take a look at jgreco's link for more, but I have 8 SATA drives in my NAS connected via a SAS HBA (see signature), so I can confirm it definitely does work.