I have one 9202-16e card, but I need another card

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

zicoz

Member
Jan 7, 2011
140
0
16
Hi, I'm currently looking to build a 2nd file server. I currently have the following parts that I've picked up over the past years:


- Norco DS-24
- Lsi 9202-16e
- Supermicro x9scm-f

So I basically have an external chassis with room for 24 drives, but I only have one 16e card, so I need a 2nd SAS-card, I was hoping to pick up another 9202-16e card, but they don't seem to be available at the moment, do you guys have any suggestions for the 2nd card that's not too expensive? I was looking at the 9206-16e, but it's a little bit on the expensive side. I was hoping to not exceed $400
 
D

dba

Moderator
Feb 20, 2012
1,477
184
63
San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
For eight port cards with external connectors, leaning toward LSI since you already have one in your setup, an LSI 9200-8e is basically half of a 9202-16e so it would be perfect.

The $425 9300-8e is your future-proof option with 12G SAS and PCIe3. For $350 you get the 9207-8e with PCIe3 but only 6G speeds. The 9205-8e is a hybrid - the controller from the 9207 but PCIe2 like the 9200. In the real world it performs exactly like a 9200, limited by PCIe bandwidth, and is no cheaper than the 9207-8e, so skip it.

So it's the 9200 if you can find a deal, the 9207 if you want something that has been around a while and is known to be stable with good driver support, or the 9300 if you want something future proof.
 
Last edited:
V

vegaman

Member
Sep 12, 2013
60
3
8
Auckland, New Zealand
mobilenvidia said:
I keep an an eye on LSI 9206-16e, not seen anything reasonably priced, but slowly is getting better.
Possibly even more desirable than the 9202-16e, as it's PCIe 3.0

Anywho, last one I saw on Ebay LSI Logic LSI00299 9206 16E SAS Controller Hard Drive RAID Controller | eBay
Click to expand...
Ouch, cheaper than that on Amazon I think. Been thinking I should probably look in getting a 16+ lane card instead of just getting another M1015, that or an expander anyway. Save me a PCIe slot for infiniband or 10GbE.
 
Z

zicoz

Member
Jan 7, 2011
140
0
16
Thank you all, is there any point in going for the 12G or PCI-E3 cards if I only have a PCI-E motherboard? It's also just a mediaserver so I don't need any extreme speeds.

Leaning dowards the 9200-8E atm.

Also, is there an "internal" version of it (either 8 or 16 ports)?
 
Last edited:
3

33_viper_33

Member
Aug 3, 2013
204
3
18
If you are using multiple striped SSDs through a single link, it will make a difference. If you have very large arrays, it could be advantageous especially when using expanders through a single link. For the average home user, it would make little difference since spinning disks are slow.

I haven’t seen PCIe 3.0 cards for anything other than graphics cards EDIT: and some of the newer 12Gb SAS Cards. EDIT END. Your PCIe 2.0 slots are likely plenty for most storage applications unless you are again talking about SSD arrays which MAY be capable of maxing out the PCIe bus 2.0 connection.

If you are looking for future proof (EDIT: especially as SSDs continue to increase in speed) and have the money to spend, go for it. If you are looking at just a handful of large spinning disks, don’t waste your money on PCIe 3.0 cards or 12Gb/s SATA/SAS.
 
Last edited:
M

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
1,244
52
48
with the cost of HBA's being so cheap (adaptec 72405,71605) , lsi, you want to match the hba to the port.

ie - I bought two hba's for 16 ssd, but in theory if my server had 4 x4 pci-e 2.0 slots I might be better off with 4 hba's since you could match the speed to the bus.

Expanders - I don't like them they add complexity and congestion. People write code/drivers for bandwidth matching and when you have congestion and drops due to qos you inflict overhead into designs that may not have been meant for it and cause all heck to happen. ISCSI is a great example of this (loss is dealt with on ip stack). FC is a great example of managing the problem (loss is unacceptable). SCSI is the protocol both speak, but scsi always assumes no loss/congestion and goes to all heck when it happens .

If you remember old san using SCSI it was nasty when errors happened. Same with ATA. How to solve it? Give more bandwidth than possible and serialize to make the cables easier to deal with!

In the end however I think everyone can agree if you can avoid congestion/errors on the bus you are better off.

A great example is using cheap switches with ISCSI and congesting gigabit. Bump up to 10gbe and having reserve capacity on the ethernet and all those problems go away.
 
Z

zicoz

Member
Jan 7, 2011
140
0
16
Thank you all, I won't ever run into any bandwith issues since all it will be doing is to serve up at the most 3 Movies at the time which should be at the very most 150Mbit/s in total. So I won't be using any SSDs apart from for the OS drive.

What I'm planning on doing is to use a 16 drive chassis as my main chassis and then the Norco DS-24 as the expander chassis

Will I be ok if I use an Adaptec 71605E for the drives in the main chassis, and then 9202-16e+9200-8e to the expander chassis, or should I find something that uses the 2008 chip instead of the 71605E?
 
MiniKnight

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
3,072
973
113
NYC
I think it would be fine. I like to just use the same brand controller so I only have to manage one set of drivers.
 
D

dba

Moderator
Feb 20, 2012
1,477
184
63
San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
zicoz said:
Thank you all, is there any point in going for the 12G or PCI-E3 cards if I only have a PCI-E motherboard? It's also just a mediaserver so I don't need any extreme speeds.

Leaning dowards the 9200-8E atm.

Also, is there an "internal" version of it (either 8 or 16 ports)?
Click to expand...
You might consider buying the PCIe3 cards if and only if you want to be able to use them in some future motherboard. There is no performance reason to buy one for your motherboard unless perhaps you will use very many SSD drives.

If you want a LSISAS2008 HBA with eight internal ports, look at these:

LSI 9211-8i - Rear facing ports
LSI 9201-8i - A version of the 9211-8i that does not support any type of RAID but has recently been selling for just $65-$75 on eBay
IBM M1015 - Top facing ports Re-flash to use the LSI firmware.

When it comes to 16 external ports, I like your LSI 9202-16e - in fact I wish that I could find four more of them. The 9201-16i is also available and has 16 internal ports, but it is a high profile card, has a single controller that isn't a 2008, uses an expander chip which can cause compatibility issues in some scenarios, and is only PCIe x8 instead of x16 like the 9202.

All of the cards mentioned above use the same driver as your 9202, except for the 9201-16i.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom