Adaptec/Microsemi SmartHBA 2100 4i4e SAS3 12Gbps $125 - works great w/ ZFS, ESXi 7, can do RAID or HBA on same card

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

AveryFreeman

consummate homelabber
Mar 17, 2017
413
54
28
42
Near Seattle
averyfreeman.com
Hey,

I bought a big chunk of HP OEM Microsemi/Adaptec SmartHBAs for my lab and I don't need them all, so I'm selling a few that I am not using. They work great w/ ESXi 7.0 so far, using native SmartPQI driver. I've also used them with ZFS VMs both through RDM and PCI passthrough.

The really cool thing about these cards is you can have a RAID array and a standard HBA on the same card. They have some interesting support for software defined storage with OpenStack and Ceph, too - all the way up to Juju charm recipes.

I've had plenty of LSI HBAs and these are essentially the same in HBA mode, but they're more flexible in a few ways - most notably the native ESXi 7 support and the ability to do both HBA and RAID at the same time. I haven't tried them with OpenStack, but I imagine they'd be a good fit.

I was a little put-off by the 4i4e setup, but I actually just ran a 1ft external cable back into my servers to these Mellanox 40GbE cards I bought that just happens to have a SAS internal/external converter on it.

I have them listed on eBay but would sell a little cheaper through STH - lab monkey discount You can view the listing here: HP Microsemi Adaptec SmartHBA 2100-4i4e SAS3 adapter 12Gbps VMWARE ESXi 7.0 | eBay
 
  • Like
Reactions: Samir

mister_dj

New Member
Feb 23, 2017
14
3
3
28
What size cache for the RAID operations (or does it even have any)?
Can it do RAID 6? Can it pull 500MBps+ for RAID 5/6 writes?

I may be interested in one possibly
 
  • Like
Reactions: Samir

AveryFreeman

consummate homelabber
Mar 17, 2017
413
54
28
42
Near Seattle
averyfreeman.com