Question How come no one told me about HBA SAS cards until now?

[Ronstang]

Well actually no one told me I was doing some research on SATA chipsets because I needed a SATA PCI card with at least 8 ports and found an article that no one should use a cheap SATA expansion card because for the most part they use port multipliers to make lots of ports and thus your transfer speed suffer etc. So I picked up a 9207-8I IBM OEM with the LSI chipset HBA and it came with two one meter cables for right at $30.....which is cheaper than a junk SATA card with 8 ports that use multipliers.

The best part about this is it is way faster than the SATA card and cheaper. I do not claim to know anything about this except that this is the way to go if you need more SATA ports for your media server. I replaced a cheap 4 port SATA card and the transfer rates are incredible now and I can actually have my case full of drives.

You learn something every day.

 

[Tech Junky]

I tied that once and couldn't get the card to come online and sent it back to CN and of course USPS lost it and has to file a claim. Technically the cards are raid cards that people tend to dumb down to port multipliers but since they're smart cards they do perform a bit better than others. When I was running spinners it was always a thought on how to grow the space but eventually I went in another direction and went 2.5" nvme which gets more space than M2 drives and they run cooler. Not to mention completely silent.

 

[Shmee]

Yup, I have an LSI card flashed to IT mode in my Truenas, great way to add ports and get good performance with SATA drives. Only issue was I had to do cover one of the PCIe pins with tape, otherwise the system won't post, but this is a known issue on some boards.

 

[Tech Junky]

otherwise the system won't post

I could post and boot but, the card wouldn't come online nor the drives. It showed its bios process but didn't do much and this was a new not a pull. I wasn't too invested in messing with it to get it working it was just to see if I could get more performance vs the native ports. It's all history at this point though.

 

[Ronstang]

I put this card in today, added another Blu-Ray drive I stripped from an old HTPC and after getting all the cables where I wanted them buttoned up the case, plugged everything in, turned on the machine and went into the other room for something and when I came back it was at the desktop....hit "This PC" and voila....all my drives show up and perform better than ever. I cannot complain for ~$30.

I cannot convert to SSDs, it just isn't practical yet. In this machine I have two 16TB drives, an 18TB one, two 2TB NVME, and one 1TB 2.5" SSD along with four 4TB drives in the hot swap cage at the moment. I couldn't replace those 66TB of space with SSD. Too expensive and I'd need tons of drives. Maybe in the future. I never thought I'd have this kind of storage in any machine 10 years ago.

 

[Tech Junky]

66TB

Gradual replacement is the key to converting at a price point that's easier to stomach. 16tb NVME drives could put a dent in that number for space. You'd need a x16 oculink card with dual cables plugged into each port and that right now would be $150 roughly. Drives in that capacity depending on what speed you want can be as cheap as $800 and go up from there. At that price point they start at Gen 3 speeds ~3.5GB/s. Or you could use the SAS card potentially as well and different cables for a bit cheaper but the speeds may be lower. There's different speeds for SAS 12/24. Then also it depends on the version of the slot it's in as well.

SAS 12 / 1.5GB/s - SFF-8643 // shouldn't be used w/ NVME / too slow
SAS 24 / 3GB/s - G3 / SFF-8654
Oculink 32 / 8GB/s - G4 . SFF-8611/8612

 

[Ronstang]

SSDs of large capacity are not in the budget now....not at 3+ times the price of conventional storage. You also need backups and I have 1:1 backups on spinners. All of my 4TB drives become backups that are offline and in the cabinet. I just got married and my wife has 4 young school age kids so I barely spend money on this stuff as it is right now. I am working with what I have. I am using a very old case that needs to be replaced but it works....so I keep it. The only reason I have a brand new CPU/Mobo in the new server is my friend's parents bought it for me for a Birthday/Wedding present.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

The only thing I'd advise is that depending on your build, you should probably put a fan on it. Those cards were meant to be put in servers with very high static pressure, and they are attached with bare minimum heatsinks. Those old 9207 designs use between 10-16W of power, and if you look at the little heatsink they mount it to, you can visually see it's completely inadequate for passive operation. If you have this card in a server case, then it's probably fine. If it's in a general case with slow moving fans, then there's a chance it will overheat, and overheating can introduce bit errors. Strapping on even a 40x10mm Noctua and giving it the ~5 CFM it provides will make a huge difference in temps.

The only other things to be aware of is that when you get one, make sure you're on the last release of firmware for those things (P20 in the case of the 9207), and you may want to run the administrative tools to make sure you can see the status of the card in your OS.

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Enjoy the card! I've had around 3 running in my servers mostly dedicated to Storage for 11 years now and they've served me well.