Mine wouldn't detect a SAS3 SSD, but worked fine with SAS2 SSDs (connected at same time). haven't attempted to look into it yet. got the card a few months ago
Inspur-branded LSI9300-8i for $50
- Thread starter piranha32
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That would make sense. It was a desktop/consumer platform with the pluggable power cables that IIRC were fed by the SATA power connectors. I'll look into it, thanks for the tip!
Link with current availability still.
$16 shipped from California still just seems insane to me - I dont really ever remember being able to *consistently* find SAS2008 gen cards for anything less than $20-25 (though could be I simply wasnt in the market during some period that they were I guess), and here we are now with months on end regularly having new listings crop up across various sellers for less! These things were ~$300 new, and now go for just 5% of that with basically no down side
... Now if only we can get SSDs to sell on the secondary market for ~5% of their original new price lololol
$16 shipped from California still just seems insane to me - I dont really ever remember being able to *consistently* find SAS2008 gen cards for anything less than $20-25 (though could be I simply wasnt in the market during some period that they were I guess), and here we are now with months on end regularly having new listings crop up across various sellers for less! These things were ~$300 new, and now go for just 5% of that with basically no down side
... Now if only we can get SSDs to sell on the secondary market for ~5% of their original new price lololol
Semsotai is one of my favorite ebay sellers. I am well north of 200 units ordered from them. I bought mostly SATA SSDs and about 20 of those SAS3008 HBAs - not a single dud so far.
I can echo @BeTeP's response on Semsotai's Inspur SAS3008 cards. Very fast shipping and excellent packaging. I bought 2 Inspur LSI 9300-8i cards and they came flashed in IT mode like the listing stated. They were running firmware 15.00.00.00 and bios 8.35. They were giving me very poor performance as is so I flashed 16.00.12.00 fw and updated the bios to 8.37 as well as updated the uefi bios to 18.00.00.00. After that I saw expected transfer speeds with 2 raidz vdevs. I was able to saturate the 1 Gbps link so I threw a mellanox card in and got a 40Gbe link setup and much better transfer speeds. I am transferring 28 TB through them now with TrueNAS ZFS on HGST SAS 6GB/s drives. I don't have any 12 GB/s SAS drives to test full bandwidth but seem to be operating correctly so far! Highly recommend adding a small 40 or 50mm x 10 or 20mm fan if you can fit it, as they get very HOT!
PS: I read on a forum here that you definitely want fw 16.00.12.00 if running SATA drives as there is a shutdown issue/bug on previous firmwares.
CORRECTION: Was actually on a TrueNAS forum, link for reference: LSI 9300-xx Firmware Update
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@Fritz what card/firmware are you running? I need to get a SFF-8087 to sata cable but would like to test this on a LSI Inspur 9300-8i.
@cheezehead I don't have a Dell branded LSI card to compare but I have hit the physical limitation on 6Gb/s HGST SAS drives w/40Gbe fiber with my Inspur LSI 9300-8i card. I don't have any 12Gb/s drives to test full bandwidth. I'm still in the testing phase but seems to be a great cheap option for homelabs. I probably wouldn't run anything production/business level on the Inspur's.
Physically these have a much smaller heatsink size and get super hot. You need forced airflow outside of a server chassis imo to not thermal/melt these. Surprised how small this heatsink is vs the very-much-pita Dell 9300's I have. Mine are luckily all in servers and still very hot to touch after shutdown.