I still like LSI SAS HBA’s and would use them over some no-name chinese m2 SATA adapter in a PCIe to m2 adapter. Daisy chaining adapters is usually not a good idea.
But I (partially) agree.
Broadcoms customer service is miserable. And trying to find the latest firmware on their nightmare of a website is also a miserable experience. But that is - usually - a one time inconvenience, and then you are off to the races.
If all you want to do is use either SATA or SAS hard drives, there is absolutely no reason to buy LSI 9400, 9500 or 9600 series adapters.
The 9300’s and 9305’s are perfect for this. They support 6Gbit/s SATA and 12Gbit/s SAS.
I have a few 9300-8i’s and they are all great. I have two 9305-24i’s and they are fantastic.
I’ve never used a 9305-16i, but they should be good too.
The only one I would caution against would be the 9300-16i, as it is essentially just two 9300-8i’s stuck together on the same board using a PCIe switch, and as a result they run pretty hot and use a fair amount of power.
The only downside with the 9300 and 9305 series is that SATA Trim is not implemented, so if you plan on using SSD’s, this can be an issue.
The best part about the 9300 and 9305 series is that they are very affordable these days, as they are a few years old. You can get them from a reliable Enterprise hardware recycler on eBay fir a fraction of what they once cost.
There are 9300-8i’s on there fro $16 right now. 9305-16i’s for onlt about $100 and 9305-24i’s for only about $175, which is very reasonable for the capacity you get. I’d go with these over some “chinese adapter in a chinese adapter” any day.
As for the 9400, 9500 and 9600 series, I do understand where you are coming from, from an abstraction layer perspective. They seem to interact with NVMe devices and present them to the OS as if they were some sort of SCSI device, with some ugly translation layer in between.
Whole they do this with NVMe devices, they don’t appear to inject themselves in any untoward way between the OS and the drive when it comes to SATA or SAS devices.
Using NVMe devices on LSI 9400, 9500 and 9600 adapters is really more of a convenience thing than it is a performance thing. The 9400 series absolutely kills NVMe performance. The 9500 is a little better, but it really wasn’t until the 9600 series that these “Tri-Mode” HBA’s really became decent performance wise.
And I agree, I’d be a little bit weary of what the adapter is doing there sitting in between my ZFS pools and the drives. They might be validated to Enterprise standards, but it still does make me a little uncomfortable. But again, that is really only an NVMe issue, not an issue when using them for SATA or SAS.
