Hardware RAID for old motherboard

[AndyInNYC]

Hi,

I have an ASUS m4A785-M motherboard with an LSI 9750-8i with 5x4TB drives. The storage space is full and the household's needs seem unquenchable - so I need more storage.

I purchased 4x20TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives and unfortunately the LSI card only sees them 'sometimes' - which make it useless, obviously.

The machine is nothing but a bit bucket with Samba shares which works perfectly fine for our needs, but the processor is too underpowered to do software RAID.

I can get an HPE P440 on ebay 'cheap', but I'm not sure what power connector I need for the cache and I'm not sure that an SF 8643 is the cable I need.

I *think* the P440 should work (more slowly) in the ASUS PCIe 2.0x16 slot - thoughts to the contrary?

So,

a) what bits and pieces do I need if I purchase a P440? Am I correct on the backward compatibility?
b) what other RAID hardware might I purchase (and what bits are needed) to work with this motherboard?

Choice c) is to buy something like a UGREEEN DXP6800 Plus, but that's really overkill for us - I have a proxmox box running all the 'non' storage apps and doing all the work (with a current generation chip).

Help and thoughts?


Andrew

 

[nexox]

I don't know anything specific about that p440 but from pictures it seems to have an uncommon or proprietary SAS port, so cables are probably going to cost enough to make it cheaper to get something with the more normal SFF-8643 port(s).

Also consider that it would probably be very inexpensive to upgrade the whole system to something with PCIe 3.0 (many of the cheaper server platforms use a bit of power, but likely so does anything old enough to run PCIe 2.0,) and if your software supports it, you could go software RAID with onboard SATA ports.

 

[AndyInNYC]

Looking to swap boards and be done. I have no dog in the race yet.

Suggestions?

 

[nexox]

I haven't shopped for a hardware RAID card in almost 20 years so I don't really know what's available, but maybe something based on the LSI 3108 controller? Depends on the RAID level and cache/battery/capacitor configuration you prefer.

Make sure to use cables under 1 meter long since you're running SATA drives.

 

[AndyInNYC]

Looking to do RAID5.

Anyone else have $.02 worth to toss in?

 

[gea]

Looking to do RAID5.

Anyone else have $.02 worth to toss in?

Raid-5 with 20TB disks ????

If a disk fails in a Raid-5 any read error afterwards in a degraded or rebuilding array can mean a whole array lost. This is different ex to ZFS Z1 where in the same situation only the affected file is lost.

In the end, Raid 5 is a bad choice with many or large disks, use Raid-6 then or switch to a modern ZFS (software) Raid with Copy on Write and checksums.

What I would suggest:
Move to ZFS software raid with a new mainboard