I could use some advise - I recently purchased 4 16TB 6Gb/s drives to expland my Proxmox server storage and also picked up an LSI Logic 05-25703-00 9305-16i 16-Port SAS 12Gb/s Controller Card. The SAS controller is a bit overkill (and expensive) as the drives only run at 6Gb/s and I’m only planning to have 8 internal drives. I’m thinking about cancelling my SAS controller order and upgrading elsewhere.
Planning to create a RAIDZ2 pool with the new drives.
Q: Any tried and true SAS controllers for 8 internal SATA drives that you all love?
My current NAS is using all 8 SATA ports on an ASUS x370-Pro board. They seem to work fine. I’m running btrfs in RAID10. If I was doing something else a card to do fast RAID6 with a battery backup cache would be a good idea.
Unfortunately my current MOBO only has 6 SATA ports. And it has been great with the 3 drive RAIDZ1 pool I have been using. Upgrading the MOBO and CPU could be another option. Thank you for the reply!
If you are only running hard drives then an old 3GBps controller would do the job, for around $10.
If you are going for new kit an LSI 9200 series is fine for 6Gig.
If buying off scambay avoid the $20 “from Hong Kong” ones branded as LSI. A better solution is to go for a white label unit from Dell, HP or toshiba that is the same card but rebadged.
I bought a pair of Toshiba branded LSI 9000 series cards a year ago and they have been rock solid. I’ll check the model number of you want more details.
Pro’s;
-hardware RAID
-512mb onboard cache
-can use a battery for read/write protection
-8i works with up to 8 devices
-uses both SAS and SATA (make sure you get the right cables for the drives you’re using)
-sell on eBay 2nd pretty cheap
Con’s;
-I believe it needs a x8 pinned slot (may work in x4 pinned slot too)
-needs active cooling
-personally on 4i version I get up to 120mbs write bursting but about 20mbs-30mbs sustained write’s over long durations (even with active cooling).