probably any enterprise card that supports JBOD (sometimes referred to as “IT mode”).
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The sale to my card has become flaky. He no longer ships to Australia.
never lucky.
Check out this product
I think this will do the same as the other I was looking at, and it is a fraction of the cost. Am I right in thinking this will do the same?
Coz I’m new to all this stuff, I just want to confirm this will do the same as what I want. 3m iops. 16 internal devices. It’s pretty much identical except it’s 1/3 the price.
How many drives of what sort, what capacity/performance you are aiming for?
From past testing on SATA ports off the motherboard chipset, saw ~2-3GB/s, before they started to bottleneck. Spinning drives are not going to get close to that limit. SATA SSDs will bottleneck (especially striped volumes) a bit past ~6x drives.
Just so we are on the same page, current advice is to use software RAID, not something built into the specialized controller. A software RAID is not going to care if drives are on different controllers.
Stay away from the low-end SATA controllers. I bought an AsMedia SATA controller card a couple years ago, and barely got more than one-SSD throughput. (Maybe OK for spinning disks? Maybe better with newer cards?)
This will be for 12 hdd’s and 4 SSD’s.
This is more for a permanent setup. But by the looks of it it’s quite fast and good. The microchip controller brand is better but I cannot get one.
I’m asking if this is as good spec for spec (apart from the other 24g sas) and whether it should withstand a time. It’s for HARDWARE raid 6. Around 200tb+
I can get that hpe 16x controller for really really cheap, it’s not that dope microchip megaraid 3200-16i card. But it looks to be capable of similar throughput 13.500mbps and does 3million iops. I think this might be a reliable choice.
ahh, you’re right, I was thinking of the first generation enthoo. Phanteks extra/accessory drive caddies are actually pretty robust, they don’t feel as flimsy as some other manufactures do.
I had alittle bit of trouble getting ahold of a microchip raid card too, there was a point where they were sold out everywhere for over a year.
One thing you want to look out for if getting used is that the card comes with it’s super capacitor (sometimes called a battery backup unit/BBU; Iithium ion batteries were phased out many years ago because they aren’t reliable long-ish term)
That is a broadcom based controller which is in and of itself not a problem, but it’s got HP firmware on it that may or may not have weird artificial limits on it.
At one point in the past I remember HP firmware cards not allowing non-HP “branded” drives to connect to them.
Hardware raid is still a very legitimate choice for a variety of situations, from users wanting an “easy button” approach to users who more reliability than software raid can achieve. hwraid performance is typically better than *legitimate swraid as well, after all it is an accelerator.
There are a bunch of other imo not so legitimate/safe software raid solutions like VROC and Graid to name a few that do some unsafe things with data in the name of speed.
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Fuck my life finding one of these controllers at a decent price with a somewhat future proofing the build is becoming difficult.
I bet you can’t even flash something else on it, it’s that restricted.
And a question about your super capacitor quote, do all card require them? Or just some of the cards come with a super capacitor?
tbh I’ve never looked into that; it makes me nervous though because going that far off the beaten path with something that is supposed to be reliably handling my data doesn’t inspire confidence.
Most all the cards will run without them, but might force you to run in a “write through” mode instead of a “write back” mode, this would be a performance hit. Pretty much all the mid to high end cards came with a super capacitor unit from the factory.
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Ok, so I got myself a 3254C16IXS, I HAD TO BUY A SUPER CAP FROM THE MICROCHIP WEBSITE, I PLANT TO JUST PLUG IT IN WHEN IT ARRIVES DOWN THE TRACK AFTER MY BUILD IS COMPLETE… I need cables though, I think the cables I’m after are miniSAS to 8x sas breakout,
Man this thread went from questions to answers to solutions and soon results
I’m so excited for this build and want to Tha K everyone in the thread that helped me and answered all my questions. You guys have been great. I can’t wait to get this rig sorted.
The 3254C16IXS should definitely have a super capacitor; it’ll be a little pouch with cylindrical cells in it that is attached via some fairly long wires.
Going off-brand with the cable is usually fine as long as it’s decent quality, you want a “x8 SFF-8654 to eight U.3 SFF-8639” cable.
If you did want to go “genuine”, either a Microchip 2305400-R or a Broadcom 05-60006-00 cable will work for SATA or SAS drives attached directly to the raid card. Either one of those cables only connects to 8 drives so you’ll need 2 of them if you want to run 12 drives.
Probably some of this is because we’re talking hardware raid, if we were talking software raid we could talk pros-cons till the cows came home and there would still be no clear consensus.
edit: here’s that the supercap for current gen microchip cards looks like:
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I just order an ascm-40f from microchip directly.
These cables terminate too u.3 but the u.3 is powered via molex. Is there a sata power u.3 variant of this cable?
The only vendor that I’ve seen offer a sata power version is Areca, but availability of it isn’t very good. Areca 26II-1C5439-1M00-U3 is the cable.
Another alternative would be to just use a cable that breaks out x8 SFF-8654 straight into sata. The downside of using this cable would be you could only plug sata drives into it (no SAS or nvme):
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How does u.3 plug into nVME? Into a dock or something?
Straight into the back of the 2.5" nvme drive using the SFF-8639 connector, the nvme drive must be U.3 though for this cable (most 2.5" nvme drives at this point are U.2 instead).
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I understand lol. Excellent help you’ve been mate. I really appreciate it.
Gentleman and a scholar.
Btw does that cable website you linked do sata piggy back cables? I’m looking now and maybe my keywords are wrong.
It gets confusing because U.2 and U.3 drives are the exact same physical connector, its just a slight electrical difference between the two.
What’s a sata piggy back cable? like the cables that incorporate power into the connector?
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A bank or daisy chain of sata 15 power.
ohhh. I think I’d call that a sata power squid… but apparently the rest of the internet doesn’t agree with me based on the lack of search results.
maybe something like this?:
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