I am building a new TrueNAS scale server that will have 12 hard drives (rotational). Would I be better off using a 16 port LSI HBA, or should I use the six motherboard SATA ports with an eight port LSI HBA? Which ever HBA that I decide on would be PCI 3.0 running on eight lanes. The motherboard in question is the Gigabyte X570S Aero G.
HBA vs motherboard based SATA controller
- Thread starter wkelley70
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It's not going to matter much, SATA is SATA, even if you run it over SAS. There used to be some weird issues with ASMedia SATA3 ports on some mainboards that were separate from the chipset, but that was probably a decade ago by now.
The one advantage an HBA can have is the availability of SES and GPIO communication, but that only matters if you have a SAS/SATA drive cage and backplane. Just attaching the drives directly with a cable will make no difference.
The one advantage an HBA can have is the availability of SES and GPIO communication, but that only matters if you have a SAS/SATA drive cage and backplane. Just attaching the drives directly with a cable will make no difference.
I think it would be better to use the 16-port LSI HBA, as it would allow you to connect all 12 hard drives to the controller, giving you more flexibility in terms of drive configuration and allowing for more potential storage capacity. Using the six motherboard SATA ports with an eight-port LSI HBA would limit the number of hard drives that you can connect to the controller, potentially limiting your storage capacity.
None of that makes sense. ZFS doesn't care where the drives are hooked up, as long as you get sd*/sg* device nodes. If the total amount of ports would be an issue, there is nothing preventing another 8-Port (or 16-Port) HBA from being added. Heck, you can even replace the one that's in there and ZFS still won't care (especially when you use WWN's or serial numbers in the pools).