I’m in the process of redoing my server, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m ready to buy some HBAs. Currently I’m looking at grabbing two LSI 9211-8i’s flashed to IT mode, but before I go and buy them I just want to see if anyone has experience running them on newer platforms like my Prime Z590 to make sure that they actually work. I’ve only been able to find one thread with them not working on Z590, however it was with a Gigabyte board instead of ASUS, and from experience it seems like Gigabyte boards like to throw fits with somewhat niche hardware like this.
These are rather old by now and how many ports do you need? I would suggest that you look for at least one generation newer or another potential option is that you look fo a simple AHCI compatible controller such as ASMedia ASM1166 or similar.
As long as I can break it out to 8 SATA ports per card I’m pretty happy. What would you recommend instead of the 9211’s? I’m on a bit of a budget for this project so if the price can still be in the 30-40 USD range per HBA that’d be ideal. The only other card I’ve seen recommended is the 9267, however I am far from knowledgeable on these cards so I am entirely unsure if that’s a better option or not.
A PCIe card is a PCIe card so there should be no compatibility issues between the card and the motherboard itself. The thread you found of someone saying they were having problems with it is likely just an example of how people usually don’t make all of their success stories public, just the failures. If there was some sort of massive issue with Z590 and LSI HBAs, you would be finding lots of results.
If you are planning on doing some form of software RAID, which is preferable these days, you want to make sure that the card is flashed into IT mode so that the the OS can see the raw block devices. If the HBA you bought does not come in IT mode, you can find directions online that cover how to flash it yourself.
If you are working with spinning rust and you want to save as much money as possible then the 9211s are fine, the mechanical speed of the drives are a much bigger bottleneck than the HBA. The biggest limiting factor with these HBAs is that they are PCIe 2.0, but a PCIe 2.0 lane has 500 MB/s of bandwidth and most HDDs can only do around half of that. Each drive gets it’s own lane (it’s a PCIe x8 card that can have 8 drives attached) so the 9211 is more than fast enough. If you are planning on using SATA/SAS SSDs though, you should upgrade to a PCIe 3.0 HBA.
I am running an old ASUS P8H61-M LX2 R3.01 LGA1155 MATX motherboard for one server and a Z690 MSI motherboard for my main machine using the same 9211-8i HBA. I have never experienced issues with the controller not showing up drives. What are you planning on using UnRaid, TrueNas? The HBA card will work as expected in both scenarios.
I own 4 of the 9211-8i HBA controllers, and I haven’t had any problems. From my experience, be careful with the breakout cables; they are a little fragile.
The setup that I use is as follows:
9211-8i HBA: Fujitsu 9211-8i D2607-A21 6Gbps SAS LSISAS2008 P20 IT Mode ZFS FreeNAS unRAID US | eBay
Mini SAS to 4 SATA SFF 8087 cables: Mini SAS to 4-SATA SFF-8087 Multi-Lane Forward Breakout Internal Cable 50CM | eBay
I’m actually a bit of an odd one out in that I’m using Windows 11 Education and will be throwing all of my drives into a parity Storage Space. I tooled around with TrueNAS and Unraid and neither one ticked all the boxes.
Unraid had the ease of whacking a new drive in whenever but TrueNAS was better for my use of 3 different drive size pools comprised of 4TB (or 6TB, haven’t weighed the cost yet), 1TB, and 8TB drives (each with their own share), whereas Windows surprisingly does both.
Given that it’s EoL (last drivers for Windows released in 2015) I’d bit a bit careful on especially new Windows platforms but that’s up to you.
Here are two examples of ASM1166 based cards
Be a bit careful about variants as all are not 2x PCIe 3.0
If you feel a bit more adventurous you can also do something like this I guess:
That’s using JMB585 controllers but there are also variants using ASM1166
I haven’t tested any of the latter listed solutions myself but I do have a ECS06 which runs along just fine in FreeBSD for me at least. There’s another user on the forum using the Startech adapter without any reported issues too also on FreeBSD.
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