Where have all the cheap 8-port SATA controllers gone?

[MongGrel]

Avoid China sellers. Too many poor clones. Stick to used pulls.

+1

 

[Auric]

A quick eBay search shows the IBM M1015 @ $94 shipped from US sellers, and the equivalent Dell H200 @ $74. They are both essentially LSI SAS9220-8i capable of IT mode with appropriate firmware flash.

 

[Red Squirrel]

There's a guy on ebay now selling brand new LSI M1015 controllers for $90 + 10 shipping. Direct from china. So you don't even need to buy a used card if you don't want. I'd rather have a new one as opposed to a server pull if I was buying one.

Here's the listing.....http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-LSI-Meg...86-/261502606954?_trksid=p2141725.m3641.l6368

Those are the ones I use I think, the problem is still the fact that they only have 2 ports (8 drives total), and required to be flashed, which requires a floppy disk and floppy disk drive. For 24 bay+ machines you are limited by the amount of PCI slots you have. It adds another requirement when shopping for a motherboard. For 24 bays it's not too bad, you can use 3 cards and 3 slot boards are not that hard to come by, but for some cases that have like 36 or even more bays it becomes harder.

Wish they'd make non raid cards that have like 6+ ports or something. Not sure why they arn't made.

 

[rchunter]

Avoid China sellers. Too many poor clones. Stick to used pulls.

Yeah, you're probably right, but that guy looks like he has pretty good feedback and he's sold quite a few of them. Regardless, i've bought all the sas cards I need to buy for a good long while anyway so I won't be buying one from him.

 

[rchunter]

Those are the ones I use I think, the problem is still the fact that they only have 2 ports (8 drives total), and required to be flashed, which requires a floppy disk and floppy disk drive. For 24 bay+ machines you are limited by the amount of PCI slots you have. It adds another requirement when shopping for a motherboard. For 24 bays it's not too bad, you can use 3 cards and 3 slot boards are not that hard to come by, but for some cases that have like 36 or even more bays it becomes harder.

Wish they'd make non raid cards that have like 6+ ports or something. Not sure why they arn't made.

That's why I bought these from newegg. AOC-SAS2LP-MV8. No flashing required
Yeah for 36 bays you would probably definitely have to go the expander route. I've got a SM x10sl7-f which has onboard lsi 2308 sas (there's 14 ports right on my motherboard.). Then I add a couple 8 port pci-e sas cards. I have plenty of ports to go around, extra even. I just have a Norco 4224 case.

 

[Auric]

Those are the ones I use I think, the problem is still the fact that they only have 2 ports (8 drives total), and required to be flashed, which requires a floppy disk and floppy disk drive.

They can be flashed from the running OS including Windows, or a DOS boot device such as a thumb drive. If not requiring boot capablility from any attached drives then the BIOS may as well be erased (to avoid delay of system boot), and just update the firmware.


http://www.lsi.com/support/pages/do...00049&assettype=0&productname=LSI+SAS+9211-8i

 

[VirtualLarry]

Avoid China sellers. Too many poor clones. Stick to used pulls.

I agree. I got burned on some cheap Chinese 4GB DDR2-800 sticks recently. No more.

 

[Red Squirrel]

They can be flashed from the running OS including Windows, or a DOS boot device such as a thumb drive. If not requiring boot capablility from any attached drives then the BIOS may as well be erased (to avoid delay of system boot), and just update the firmware.


http://www.lsi.com/support/pages/do...00049&assettype=0&productname=LSI+SAS+9211-8i

Oh these may be different then, I know the ones I had had specific instructions involving making a DOS boot disk. I even had to edit hymem stuff so the app runs properly. I felt like it was year 2000 again. Once I got the process down path it was easy though. They are nice cards for the price so was worth it in the end.

My file server is still running smoothly since 2013 or so (I don't remember, just going by the date of system folders like /var) and the bays are almost filled. 1 raid 5 array and 2 raid 10's using mdadm raid.

 

[XavierMace]

Wish they'd make non raid cards that have like 6+ ports or something. Not sure why they arn't made.

Because there's a finite amount of bandwidth available over a single bus. The M1015 has 8x SAS 6Gb/s (600MB/s) links. That's 4.8GB/s bandwidth. PCIe 1.0 is 250MB/s per lane. PCIe 2.0 is 500MB/s. PCIe 3.0 is 984MB/s. The controllers use 8 lanes. Which means to be able to feed all 8 links at their maximum rated speed (regardless how unlikely that may be), you already need 10 PCIe 2.0 lanes.

If you're more concerned about device count than bandwidth, that's what an expander is for. You can even daisy chain expanders with ever decreasing performance and ever increasing chance for failure.

 

[Auric]

It is an x8 card but the example of PCIe 2.0 with 500MB/s per lane, given a mainstream motherboard's x4 slot (secondary to PCIe 3.0 x16), equals 2000MB/s or 250MB/s for each of 8 drives which is more than enough for HDD where maximum sequential burst is significantly less and sustained average a fraction (also unlikely for all to be accessed simultaneously). Even if theoretical bandwidth was halved to 125MB/s it would be largely inconsequential to typcial useage. Of course the card could be plopped into the primary slot if not required for a dGPU.

 

[XavierMace]

It is an x8 card but the example of PCIe 2.0 with 500MB/s per lane, given a mainstream motherboard's x4 slot (secondary to PCIe 3.0 x16), equals 2000MB/s or 250MB/s for each of 8 drives which is more than enough for HDD where maximum sequential burst is significantly less and sustained average a fraction (also unlikely for all to be accessed simultaneously). Even if theoretical bandwidth was halved to 125MB/s it would be largely inconsequential to typcial useage. Of course the card could be plopped into the primary slot if not required for a dGPU.

A) You are forgetting when these cards were released PCIe 3.0 wasn't a thing.
B) That's assuming it's only being used to feed spindle drives. Mine is feeding 3 SSD's, plus spindles.

 

[Auric]

A) The max theoretical spec of the card only requires PCIe 2.0 x8, no?
B) Yes, but typically for SSD the mainboard ports are preferred -where at least for Intel the performance is better and there are no quirks with sensors or drive utilities which don't expect such HBA.

 

[XavierMace]

A) Yes but Red asked why you don't see ones supporting more than 8 drives without an expander. That's why.
B) Many servers don't have onboard Intel (or other brand) SATA ports. In addition, age is again a factor here. In my particular case I've got a choice of onboard 3Gb/s ports or 6Gb/s ports through the HBA. Since it is running in HBA mode, there's no quirks with sensors or drive utilities so why not hook it up to the HBA? Last but not least, most servers use hotswap drive bays with backplanes. Hooking a few drives up to the onboard controller and the rest to the HBA isn't an option.