Which HBA?

[izzie]

I am new here, and to TrueNAS, be gentle.

I work for a small business that tasked me with building a TrueNAS as our current NAS appliances don't work with SEDs. The Supermicro 6048R-E1CR36N is already purchased and populated with Xeon CPUs, 400GB+ of memory, 16x 12TB 7200RPM SAS12gbps SEDs, and 2x 400gb SAS12gbps SSDs. The server boots and all the drives are visible on the (about to be junked) raid controller.

I need to identify the best possible HBA card(s) for the system. A redundant, dual HBA, setup isn't required but the cards seem reasonably priced. Throughput is the main concern. Early next year I'm planning a networking upgrade from 10gbe to 100gb fiber. Getting the correct cables to connect the HBA to the backplane(s) is also a worry.

I had planned to setup the array similar to RAID 10. The SSDs were meant as mirrored system drives, but I believe that they might be better used as read/write cache drives. Any help you can provide would be appreciated. I feel that I'm pretty close, just looking for the right HBA and array config to move forward. Thanks!

 

[nabsltd]

Any 12Gbps SAS3 HBA (e.g., LSI 9300-8i) should work fine. You will be able to replace the existing RAID controller with the HBA and use the existing cables. Basically, just buy an HBA with the exact same number of and type ports as the existing RAID controller. If you got the stock version of the server with no upgrades, then the 9300-8i will work perfectly.

The server you purchased does not have a dual-port backplane, so you cannot use a redundant HBA setup.