I am researching building a NAS pair. one at my place and one at my friends place.
I want to run proxmox for various VM’s that are handy. I also want to run truenas, either core or scale as a VM.
I can see that I need at PCIe device to connect the NAS drives to.
I can see that the main recommendation is an HBA adapter, preferablt LSI flashed to IT mode. But as they are super expensive new and relatively sparse used here in Denmark, would it make sense to base it on a cheap PCIe SATA adapter like the startech 8p6g-pcie-sata-card?
Sune
EDIT. Upon further investigation, it seems like I can get a pair of LSI 9207-8i controllers pretty cheap on ebay. I think I will go that route.
Do note that they’re almost ancient by now, may have issues with newer hardware and require active cooling. You’re also likely to get fakes ones on eBay or such.
eBay is certainly hit and miss, but I have half a dozen HBAs that I got on eBay without any issues. When purchasing anything via eBay, just make sure that the seller has a return policy and be prepared to thoroughly test the hardware as soon as it arrives so you can return ASAP if needed.
The PCIe gen 2 HBAs are quite long in the tooth now and you are likely to have throughput issues if you use them with SATA/SAS SSDs. I would definitely stick with PCIe gen 3 cards and above. I am using 9207-8i’s and a 9300-16i in AMD zen 3 era hardware in FreeBSD and Linux without any issues. They definitely require active cooling so make sure they get adequate airflow. If you are expecting an enterprise grade experience, it is definitely preferable to stick with enterprise grade hardware.
I have had a lot of success with 10gtek brand hardware for networking and storage. It looks like they have a 9300-8I for sale on Amazon. I can’t vouch for that item in particular, but I have plenty of their hardware running for years and working great. Just something to consider.
In my experience ASM1166 seems to be a pretty decent controller and people in general seem to be happy with the Silverstonetek ECS06 variant. I have a M1015 board myself but I wouldn’t recommend anyone to get one these days as it’s based on the same SAS2008 chipset that’s been EOL for quite some time.