SAS/SATA Controller recommendation, TQ backplane

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tullnd

Member
Apr 19, 2016
59
7
8
USA
I'm finishing up assembly of a new storage server.
Chassis SC836TQ
Processor: Xeon 1240 V6
32GB (16GBx2) ECC DDR4 RAM - Will upgrade to 64Gb soon, trying to pay for a wedding this month.
Motherboard is a Supermicro X11SSM-F.
Expansion slots are:
1 PCI-E 3.0 x8 (in x16),
1 PCI-E 3.0 x8,
2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 (in x8)

I'd like to reserve one slot for a dual 10Gb ethernet or SFP+ card in the future.

I will be adding more drives in the future, plus I'm also planning on using the onboard SATA for at least one SSD boot drive(I already have the drive laying around), so I'd like the storage drives to be on a separate controller. I'd like a controller card that I can wire into the TQ backplane and don't really want to use an expander unless I need to.

While a card with two physical ports would support up to 8 drives with the splitter cables(I already have cables I sourced cheaply), that means I'd need to source another physical card when I go beyond 8. So the alternative is to source a card that support 4 physical internal ports initially.

So my options are:
One M1015 card(or one of the many alternatives) and use an expander(Intel?) to wire into the TQ backplane
Two M1015 card(or one of the many alternatives), each driving 8 individual drives
One SAS2/SAS3 card with at least 4 physical ports to wire into the TQ backplane

I'm using WD 8TB drives I harvested(mostly reds, I do have two white labels...they seem to mix fine), so I imagine any of the above will not give me a negative impact on overall performance.

M1015's run for about $40-50 each still, so anything with 4 internal ports that's in the $90-130 range? Part of me likes the idea of having just one card, even if I pay a small premium...but mostly I'm not seeing anything under $170 range.
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
743
207
43
47
I looked for a while and never found reasonably priced 16 channel SAS2 controllers. I got H210s for around $30/ea. The only 16i cards I ever found were around $300. 16e (external) cards can be had for more like $100, but then you have to loop the cables back into the chassis and I didn't like that. I also had a hard time finding cables that would adapt from the external SAS port type. They exist, but they are harder to find cheaply. I had the slots, so I just use 3x H210s on a 24 port TQ backplane.