Yes, you understood my view of the Broadcom HBA 9500 correctly.
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It seems that there aren’t any “native” high-performance HBA (= simple, not RAID-capable) chipsets anymore. It’s the same complex RAID controller chipset that’s just handling the connected drives in JBOD-only mode.
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No one seems to care about that in the present, unlike about 10 years ago when if you considered these kind of controllers for software-defined storage you’d be taken behind the shed and put down. I dislike this since it means that in 99 % of the cases drive manufacturer firmware update tools have issues detecting drives handled by such a controller.
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I also don’t like this situation since these HBAs seem to be plaqued by bugs, currently the HBA 9500 models have firmware version 31.0 and until version 28.0 it reliably crashed a system when you wanted to use S3 sleep (a feature officially supported by Broadcom), it literally took Broadcom years to fix this bug that had already been present in the HBA 9400 line they designated EOL without fixing it even when knowing about it for years.
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Haven’t had issues with the HBA 9500-16i with firmware 28 and newer.
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Not joking: For small-scale SATA-only stuff I actually prefer these simple controllers, contrary to Broadcom they’ve never failed me once, before selecting one I’m always checking that I’m able to get firmware updates for that specific model.
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For NVMe U.2 backplanes: You need a case with 5.25" bays to add backplanes like the Icy Dock ToughArmor MB699VP-B V3, be sure to get the V3 version if you ever want to use it for PCIe Gen4 or faster SSDs. Unfortunately 5.25" bays have become increasingly rarer with the decrease of demand for optical disc drives by the general public due to the proliferation of online streaming services.