Should I switch out from RAID card to HBA?

[Bert]

I have a file server at home for archival purposes. I try to take advantage of cheap old hard drives to store my personal files, movies etc. Recently, I acquired a lot of 2TB SAS harddrives from EBay for less than $20 each so I am switching from SATA to SAS drives and I plan to use SAS for my archival setup as I expect cheap SAS drives flooding the market.

My current server is based on a custom build with 12 hot swappable bays and I am using adaptec asr-51245. I am using Windows Server 2016 and storage spaces. This card worked great for me as it allows me to cover all 12 internal ports and I took advantage of the external port to add 4 more disks as cold back up of the data. Internally I did a combination of Soft and hardware RAID 0 for optimal transfer speeds. Overall system works great for me and I have the data redundant in 2 places.

But after reading that, RAID cards are trouble since when they fail, you need to find a compatible raid card to recover your data. This makes the raid card single point of failure and it makes me worried. I thought all RAID 0 setups are universal and all cards recognize an RAID0 array. For all those years , I have never had a failed RAID card but implications would be very bad. Should I worry about RAID card failure and switch to HBA SAS card? Now Adaptec 51245 is ubiquitous so it should not be so hard to find a replacement or I can buy one and keep aside. I am not sure what the best affordable option is.

What I am currently considering is buying an LSI-9201-16E as they are very affordable at $20 and add it as a second card so that in case of failure, I can use the external array of 8 drives for back up. I wonder if there are better options. The second card will take the last available slot on my mATX motherboard. Do I need good airflow for this card as my case is pretty cramped and there will not a direct fan blowing to the card?

I am also looking into getting HP P812 card. This card looks like an amazing value at 24 SAS2 port under $20 but it looks like you cannot disable the RAID mode.

Any suggestions?

 

[MiniKnight]

The 9201-16e is a good card but it's external not internal ports. You'd want a "i" card not "e"

LSI cards ship in higher volumes and are easy to find. That's what I'd do.

 

[Bert]

Thanks, I guess you are also suggesting to move to HBA card. 9201-16e works fine for me since my backup drives will be in an external sas enclosure (sans digital tr8x). For some reason 9201-16i costs $150, making it too expensive toy for me so I cannot replace the Adaptec ASR 51245 yet.

 

[SeanFi]

The P812 is a good card, and you can "sort of" disable RAID mode but it's hacky. You basically have to set each disk as its own RAID 0 array, and disable the card's write cache, but turn the drive's write cache on. This then exposes the individual drives more or less. In addition, the arrays or configurations created by those cards would be readable by any HP card from that generation so you have no worries about not being able to find a replacement.

As a disclaimer, I've never used one in that capacity, and while I do run a p812 I have it in an HP server. I'm not sure if you can update the firmware easily when they are in a non-HP server but they should work. For $20 though you don't have much to lose!

 

[Bert]

Thanks, I am going to play with HP P812 but I bought LSI9201-16E ($18) to be on the safe side. I am going to use the external SAS enclosure as the offline back up of my file storage server via LSI9201. I also found that if you create JBOD drives with Adaptec ASR 51245, they are recognizable over regular USB adapters. Since I am using windows storage spaces, I should be fine in all aspects.