This might not be the right category for this, but worth a shot in the dark. I have a RocketRAID 2680 card and I’d like to trade for an LSI 9211-4i or 8i (or really any SAS HBA). I’m expanding my Windows storage spaces pool and it would be easier if I just had a SAS controller without RAID functions.
I know I could just buy one on ebay and then sell my current card, but why not give this a shot. Maybe get some war stories about ReFS volumes and Storage Spaces in general in the process. Thanks!
I was super curious about ReFS after reading that it might finally be ready for prime time. Just using a fairly basic two drive 8TB mirrored Storage Space under Windows 10 Pro. Not even half full yet, but I’m finding it to be somewhat limiting. I’d liek to be able to present it to my ESXi host. It’s been great for my large media files, but I may pull these drives and try to get FreeNAS going or something. OMV got me this far, so maybe I’ll just use that while I continue research.
Pretty cheap used, the 4i is like 1/2 cost
I’ve got the LSI 9266-8I in the CL treasure I recently discovered, so far so good. It’s a little bit older, but I can’t complain. Trying to start filling it up with drives.
Just an update, I ended up buying a 9211-4i off ebay for 35 bucks. Once I got it flashed into IT mode with latest firmware, it works great.
I don’t know if you can do this on Win10 Pro, but have you tried setting a volume up as an iSCSI target for your ESXi host? That might be a Server only feature, not sure.
That being said, most of Storage Spaces features are Powershell only for Win10. Server has them available in the GUI. Storage Spaces really gets interesting when you are talking about 3 or more drives. The ability to use different size drives and easily expand are the main reason I am using it.
I was curious to play with ReFS and Storage Spaces, but due to the file system choice i’ve sort of painted myself into a corner. I’m really just getting started and have been testing and learning as many technologies as i have time to touch. Starting to formulate an actual plan, will be working on drawing up those specs in coming weeks.
The 8TB ReFS mirrored Storage Spaces live on my daily driver, however i recently picked up a nice old Cisco server (C240-M3), single node compute host to begin building out my wannabe homelab on a separate subnet. Still unsure if i’ll try to spin up a separate FreeNAS box and properly present storage using the three (3) 8TB drives i’ve been purchasing when BestBuy runs their Easystore sales.
Just learning about DAS or other disk shelves as storage options. I know so little about storage in general, i’ll have to research if my RAID controller can support 8088 external drives beyond the 24 2.5" internal.