Newbie sanity check, HBA card...

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Failquail

New Member
Jan 22, 2020
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Sorry for the post, been utterly confusing myself of late and it's for cable/card types i've never used before, so i'd like someone to check this will likely work :)

Case i've ordered is the Silverstone CS381 chassis. With my old PC's AMD B350 + 1700 CPU + 32GB RAM combo in it as my new NAS/VM build...
Got it all up and running for now in a temp old ATX case with unraid, but the storage config is new to me on the new case...

I need a HBA card, some list sata/sas, some list sas only, is there a difference between the two? I'll be using SATA HDDs.
I found this one, would this work? If you know of cheaper i'd be interested :)
And cables, this one? Any better options welcome...
 
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RTM

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2014
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SAS HBA's will as far as I know also support SATA disks (but you can usually check the manufacturers website for confirmation), but a SATA HBA (if such a thing exists, I think it is generally just called a SATA controller in listings) will only support SATA disks.

If you do not mind missing support in ESXi or RHEL/CentOS 8 you can go for something like the LSI 9211-8i (or IBM m1015, etc.), it may be one of the cheapest options available.

Generally speaking, known good ("cookiecutter") options are almost anything based on LSI/Avago/Broadcom's SAS2008, SAS2308 or SAS3008 (the n2215 is a SAS3008). As many of these cards come with a firmware that does RAID (generally meaning it is not a HBA) you want to ensure that you can crossflash it to "IT" mode firmware (look for instructions).

Another option is HP's H240 HBA, it is also quite cheap and relatively modern (it supports SAS3), it is not as heavily tested in whitebox systems so results may vary, but to me at least it looks like a nice and cheap alternative to the expensive SAS3008 based HBA's, here is a thread in the great deals section about this controller:

If you are looking for delivery to UK (based on the tld of your links), you may want to consider a different cable, as far as I can tell it is only sold by a Taiwan based seller, you may want something a little more local.