Which would be the smarter choice????

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rsumperl

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May 18, 2017
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Afternoon everyone,
The motherboard is an Intel S2600CP w/2 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM.
The RAID card choices are as follows, an Adaptec 8805 or a LSI 9270CV-8i. The drives are 12Gb interface drives.

Using the LSI card, the Intel board will run that card at PCIe 3, however the drive interface is only 6Gb.
Using the Adaptec card, the board will drop the PCIe speed to 2.0, however the drive interface is 12Gb.

So, which is a better choice? As an FYI, the server will have Exchange 2016 on it.
 

T_Minus

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Feb 15, 2015
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What are "the drives"?

SAS3 doesn't really matter if you're using spinning disks that happen to be SAS3 :)
If we're talking 8x SAS3 SSD then that's different.
 

T_Minus

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What am I mising?? The adaptec 8 series are pcie 3.0 cards.
Motherboard information :D boards limit to pcie 2.0 from what i reacll in the other huge thread.


Need more info though, how many drives? Are they SSD or spinners?

Even PCIE 2.0 x8 is 4GB/s iirc
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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boards limit to pcie 2.0 from what i reacll in the other huge thread.
I thought that happened only with v1 cpus on the S2600CP?

Googled broadcom 9270 and it's a pcie 3.0 card too.
If both cards have the same bus speed to the host (pcie 2.0) I would take the card with the newer sas version (adaptec).
 
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T_Minus

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I thought that happened only with v1 cpus on the S2600CP?

Googled broadcom 9270 and it's a pcie 3.0 card too.
If both cards have the same bus speed to the host (pcie 2.0) I would take the card with the newer sas version (adaptec).
I would agree with this too, not like you're going to hit that limit often or at all.

And if we're talking about 8x SAS3 SSD then I would put in 2x SAS3 HBA and get optimal performance as he can.
 

j_h_o

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Apr 21, 2015
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I've had issues with Adaptec cards with Windows boxes.

+1 for LSI -- better software for management, and better drivers.
 

rsumperl

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May 18, 2017
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The hard drives are spinners. The Adaptec card is not on the Intel S2600CP list for PCIe 3.0 interface. Yes it is a PCIe 3 card however Intel is lowering the speed to 2.0 since it's not on their "List". So basically that leaves me with an Adaptec card that can communicate with the drives at 12Gb but PCIe speed at 2.0 or an LSI card with a 6Gb hard drive interface but will do a PCIe speed of 3.0.
 

T_Minus

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Feb 15, 2015
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Pick which works best then it really doesn't matter performance wise.
 

j_h_o

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Apr 21, 2015
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Exchange 2016 best practices recommends a series of JBOD disks, with application-level fault tolerance via a DAG.

You shouldn't use a hardware RAID card for this purpose, so I'd suggest you look for an HBA instead.