LSI 9300-16i $129 obo
- Thread starter vvu
- Start date
Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.
Unless you have 12Gbps SAS SSDs, 80Gbps PCIe will do fine for 16x drives. Maybe if you have SATA SSDs and all 16 are active in the same direction (reading or writing...SAS bus is full duplex) you'll come close to 80Gbps. With spinning rust, you'll never come close.
Broadcom doesn't have any x16 cards that I can find. Even the latest are PCIe 4.0 x8.
Yeah I was gonna ask- what are people hooking this guy up to? Breakout into individual disks? Connecting to multiple backplanes? Just comparing to what I got to connect to SuperMicro backplane to understand the popularity of this card.
Your problem is the 3008 sas chip not your pci-e bandwidth.
x8 or x16 the chip can still just do about 6000MB/s throughput.
Id guess the top uses are
- Cases like cse847 with 24x3.5 front 12x3.5 rear on seperate backplanes, to get 2 cables to each (or 3 backplanes with the optional 2x2.5" bays)
- Standard case with front backplane but want to connect your SSDs directly
(both to not get the latency of going via expander chip on backplane and to not risk saturating the link to expander)
- Typical whitebox builds without a backplane
- to use it as an 8i8e to addon shelves with adapter slot to make 2 external ports.
Custom cases as well. I use an adaptec 71605 to connect 8 ssds for editing/workflow and 8 other channel for the external enclosure of hard drives to perform backup.
Last edited:
This would be exactly what I'm interested in as a future use case for me. Hopefully the seller gets more in stock in the future.
?? Plenty of these for sale on ebayThis would be exactly what I'm interested in as a future use case for me. Hopefully the seller gets more in stock in the future.
These are not hard drives or DIMMs...you don't need a dozen of them, so $10 more each is nothing. Especially when you think about the total cost of the system.Still not $40
And, the 16i (or more...they go up to 28i) is really a niche product, so it's going to be more expensive. If you have a backplane with an expander, you don't need one. If you don't have a backplane with an expander, spend $25 and buy any 8i and an Adaptec AEC-82885T for a do-it-yourself 28i8e. If you want a cheaper version of the 8i8e, you should instead get a motherboard that can handle separate 8i and 8e cards, for several reasons (no bottleneck on the PCIe connection, less worry about cable length, less issues with chipset running too hot, etc.).
Last edited:
I'm just being unnecessarily difficult/annoying/obtuse because I got hit with the DOUBLE question marks on something trivial- I agree with you.
I appreciate the insight here. I was considering if using this card would be a good idea to have two connections going to my backplane and the other two being used to go to an external connection to say, a JBOD.
If you do this, then make sure the cable from the HBA to the external adapter is as short as possible, especially if you want to run SATA drives in your JBOD.
The shortest cable with SFF-8643 on both ends that I can find is 0.3m, and you'd probably need almost all of that to run from the back of the HBA (6" long) to the external adapter without too tight of a bend in the cable. Unless the JBOD has the expander connection on the back panel, you need a cable to run from the back to the front, and the depth of a typical chassis is at least 0.5m. This leaves you 0.2m for the external cable between the server and the JBOD to be officially within the SATA specification. Grab an 8" cable and try to connect ports in two chassis that are next to each other (vertically) in your rack. It only works if the ports are directly above/below each other. Now, I'm not saying you can't use a 0.5m (or even longer) external cable...it will likely still work with SATA disks, but I haven't even taken into account any losses from the 6 plugs in the chain.
If you use the Adaptec expander, or an 8e card, you don't have to worry about the internal cable length in the server (just the JBOD), and you only have 4 plugs in the chain.
You might also have to use the extra power connector on the HBA to keep the signal quality good enough for the external chain, and that would mean more heat on a card that already runs very hot.
Sounds like this just makes more sense to do vs my idea. I guess I figured I could save a PCIe slot. Something like the LSI 9206-16e or LSI 9300-8E?
Last edited: