Need more SATA ports

[snakyjake]

What do I need to expand the SATA ports?

I just want to add a bunch of disks (JBOD) to my home NAS/file server. As time goes on, I want to add more drives too. Mostly will be filled with movies, photos, and documents. Not looking for hardware RAID.

My proposed system:
Linux
software RAID (e.g. SnapRAID)
SATA III / 6 Gb/s Drives

I'm also considering virtualizing a NAS with VMware, and just setup a beefy workstation, but still need some hardware to expand SATA ports.

I've ready something about HBA, LSI, and there's a huge long list of cards that may or may not be what I want.

Thanks,
Jake

 

[whitey]

Here ya go: this should get ya going. Now you all have my ebay search filter hehe

LSI 2008
LSI 9211-8i
LSI 9210-8i (Dell)
LSI 9220-8i (IBM)
LSI 9240-8i (IBM)
LSI 9207
IBM M1015
IBM M1010
Dell perc H200
Dell perc h310
Fujitsu LSI 2008 (D2607-A11)

 

[Aluminum]

I've seen some occasional low listings for the next-gen 12G stuff, if you're lucky can get them almost as cheap as the 6G cards:
LSI 3008
9300-8i
9341-8i (crossflash IT) - I got one for $110
9361-8i (crossflash IT)
Dell H330
probably others

SFF-8643 { SATA breakout cables are within a few dollars of the 6G cables so its not a wash there either. The only real downside is the FreeBSD sub-distros might not have drivers up to snuff for them yet, but linux and windows are fine. The upsides are PCI 3.0, 12G support and the driver/firmware updates will continue further into the future than the 6G chipset. I predict all those recent SAS SSDs will get unloaded in a few years once everyone goes pure NVME

Still mostly luck but should get better as the $200+ listings keep going unsold.

 

[snakyjake]

What are the differences between the above cards?

 

[Aluminum]

If you are using it for software raid, none of the differences matter because you are going to flash them all away. (best practice for ZFS etc) You want a recent chipset LSI controller in IT mode for direct disk access with no meddling. Once you are sure the card has the right controller, all that matters is price and connector type. (8i = 2 SAS port internal = ideal for most AIO builds)

I would even leave off the option ROM completely if you can (faster boot, less things to go wrong) just keep your boot drive on the motherboard ports.

 

[BackupProphet]

Another cheap option is SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8, its based on the Marvell chip, good support, is only SATA2/SAS1 which is 300MB/s per device and is still plenty for spinning hard drives.

 

[canta]

Another cheap option is SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8, its based on the Marvell chip, good support, is only SATA2/SAS1 which is 300MB/s per device and is still plenty for spinning hard drives.

better get OEM HBA SAS2 since not expensive.

marvell is not good performance.

if you are running 8 drives in ZFS, 300Mb (not B... 1MB is 1024K, 1Mb is 1000K) is the bottleneck when running current or 3-4 years non-ssd drives.

 

[PnoT]

9341-8i (crossflash IT) - I got one for $110
9361-8i (crossflash IT)

I picked up a few of the 9341-8i myself cheap and wanted to know how to flash them into IT mode. I sent you a pm.

 

[snakyjake]

Doing some more research, and have some questions....

My main objectives/requirements:

• Add more SATA drives
• JBOD (no hardware RAID)
• Simple
• Home media use

A table below to help track what's available to meet my above objectives.

For the LSI brand, why does LSI say their controller board can "driving up to 256 SAS and SATA physical devices"? But then I read the specs, and it only mentions 8 SATA ports. So can I attach more than 8 SATA drives to the board? How?

 

[Aluminum]

SAS Expander, though for normal use I wouldn't daisy chain them. 24-36 port LSI SAS2 are somewhat cheap/common.

Depending on your motherboard/case/rack/whatever setup though often its better to just add more controllers. For bulk/archive type storage you don't really have to give them the full x8 lanes per card either.

 

[snakyjake]

I'm confused on the SAS Expanders. Can you please provide an example of what they look like?
Is there some sort of cable that connects to the controller's SAS port, multiplies/expands the SATA ports, then attaches to the SATA drives?

My motherboard is most likely going to be an ATX workstation.
Case is most likely going to be a full tower (Fractal Design R5).

 

[Chuckleb]

Here is a SAS Expander
NeweggBusiness - Intel RAID Twenty-four port Expander Card RES2SV240

You would pair it with these cables:
NeweggBusiness - 3ware CBL-SFF8087OCF-05M 1 Unit of .5M Multi-lane Internal (SFF-8087) Serial ATA Breakout Cable

So from your RAID card, you'd run 1 cable out of the card into the expander. From the expander, you can use these 1->4 cables to get 4 SATA ports per connector. Seeing that you have 5 ports left on the expander, you can run 20 drives off a single -4i card. You don't need dual cables from the HBA since SATA doesn't do mutlipath or anything.

 

[snakyjake]

Thanks. After looking at the cost of a SAS Expander, I think I'm going to look harder at something from the top 2 in my list. If I need more drives later, I can just add another card. I don't expect to have more than 16 drives (or more drives than a tower can hold).