HBA recommendation and where to get it in Canada

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Edwin Lau

New Member
Oct 30, 2018
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Hi everyone,

I am fairly new here. Excuse me if it has been discussed before.

I am building a home NAS server with 8 drives using U-NAS NSC800 and MBD-X10SDV-4C-TLN2F-O. I would like the HBA controller to be affordable and stable in Linux. It will connect up to 8 drives. I will use it for backup running raid 6 (mdadm) or Unraid with 2 drive redundancy I don't think I need PCIe 3.0 as I will only connect 8 regular hard disks (8TB). My current choices are
  • LSI SAS 9211-8i
  • Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8
Are these cards good? Any other card that is more affordable and more stable? Another important point is where I can get the genuine version of these card in Canada? ebay and others seems to be flooded with very very cheap clones which I would like to avoid at all cost.

Thanks.
 
Last edited:

nthu9280

Well-Known Member
Feb 3, 2016
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San Antonio, TX
If you stay with used Dell H310 / H200; HP H220; IBM M1015 etc you should be fine in avoiding the counterfeit issue. Just be prepared to flash the card to LSI IT mode FW. I'd stay away from new LSI 9210 /9211 cards even from reputed re-sellers here in NA.

These used cards should now be available <$35 here in US. Not sure in Canada. HP H220 is the 9205/9207-8i PCIe 3 version of the card based on LSI 2308 chip and rest of them are PCIe 2 - LSI 2008 chip.
 

nthu9280

Well-Known Member
Feb 3, 2016
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San Antonio, TX
Another thing often overlooked is SAS -SAS / SAS - 4x SATA cables. Stay with OEM cables from Supermicro, Dell, HP, Intel either used or sometimes new can be had fairly inexpensive vs no name ones.
 
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nthu9280

Well-Known Member
Feb 3, 2016
1,628
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San Antonio, TX