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Hi, I have recently "accidentally" bought an 8TB sas drive, it is a Seagate ST8000NM001A 8TB HDD EXOS, I am planning to put it into a proliant n54l micro server just as extra storage, I have no real reason for raid as I am just using it for storage of non important footage recorded from a gopro, I think the proliant has the correct back planes, but if not I will use cables, I need a HBA as the n54l only supports SATA on board, I have no previous experience with sas, but I have been looking at using a Fujitsu 9211-8i. My question is, will that work? Or if anyone has any other suggestions, I think I have read that some HBA cards have a 4tb drive size limit. Thanks,

Hi all- I bought an LSI SAS9300-16I and I was wondering if to use it with TrueNAS Scale if I would need to flash it to IT mode or if it is plug and play. I am seeing a lot of mixed information online. Thanks!

Im trying to expand my mobo storage with a LSI HBA card, it was sold to me as: Sun SGX-SAS6-INT-Z 8 Port 6Gbps SAS 2 HBA 375-3640 In windows I get this: LSI 9207-8i From reading on Truenas forum I may need to flash this card so it runs as an HBA and not a RAID card. Mobo: Gigabyte GA-B250M-Gaming 3 Where do I start?

Hello. The title pretty much says it all. I was wondering what would happen to a software raid zfs array in freenas if the sata controller on the motherboard or an HBA the drives were connected to happened to fail. Would it be as simple as replacing the HBA or the motherboard and everything will be fine as long as the boot drive is okay? Or would data recovery professionals be the way to go? I know dealing with hardware raid card failures is a huge pain, but is it the same for zfs?

I recently came across a Seagate cheetah 15.7k 450gb HDD. However, it is using a SAS interface (image attached) I need a relatively cheap and easy way to get this drive up and running. Since my motherboard only has a SATA controller, I will need a sas HBA. Does anyone know of a good pcie sas HBA or even SATA to SAS command adapter? I don't want to spend to much money on this. But I really want to get this hard drive to work. (Sorry if this is the wrong place for this question) If anyone can help that would be great, thanks:)

Ok guys so this is long shot i know but look for any ideas that would work. We have a HP DL360 Server and a Dell DiskArray. Yes i know HP Storage units will work best with HP but got a good deal on the Dell ones and would like to see if we can get them to work. The issuse is that if we use a HP smart array PCIe card the unit it detected but we are getting extra drives detected. So the HP smart controller should be seeing 80 Drives but it says there are 112 Drivves which is not possible. We got a Perc card but the Hp server will not boot and gives us illegal opcode when trying to boot cant even get into BIOS before it does that. Yes the unit works if we have the controllers in HBA mode but we dont want to have to configure a RAID array on windows. We need the RAID cards to manage it. Need sometihing stable that we can use for production ideally. happy to use the Smart array or Dell Perc card to get it to work. Updated the BIOS of the Server in hopes that would allow some compatibility but that has not helped. Open to suggestions we can try to get it working stable. HP DL360 Server Dell Storage Array

Hi, I am working on a project to expand my storage. I am not looking for any kind of raid as I am using this to store a bunch of random data. So to begin with I am using a Dell R720XD with (1) 1 Terabyte SSD for OS and random software and I have filled up the remaining 12 bays with a mix of 8 and 10 Terabyte drives using an LSI 9207-8I that came from the factory. I have maxed out our current space in the lab, So a buddy of mine went out on a limb and purchased a IBM DCS3700 JBOD with 60 Hot Swap Bays. As of now there is only (1) 10 Terabyte drive in the JBOD for testing. I installed a LSI 9207-8e ,flashed in IT Mode, into the Dell 720XD and connected a serial Attached SCSI SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 cable each device. I check the BIOS of the LSI 9207-8e and I can see container labeled DCS3700. I am using windows 10 and in the device manager I see two LSI, SAS2 2308 Mustang listed under storage controllers. But I don't have any clue from here how to see my test drive, it does not show up in disk management nor in PC under devices. Any Help Would Be Greatly Apppreciated, Thanks,

Little bit of background I am in the process of building a new computer I wanted to try something new by using a RAID 5 setup, but, I am running into some problems for the most part I think I understand how to set it all up through bios but I am having issues figuring out what RAID card to get that best fits my needs been searching around on here for some answers and its kinda all over the place so I figured maybe this is a case by case sort of problem so ill list out what I have so far. First RAID 1/0/10 are not options I don't want to do them even though I understand they are simpler and require less work, I am pushing my self to do a RAID 5 setup. OS: Win 10 Drives: 6x Kingston 120GB A400 SSDs Type of RAID Card: PCIE x8 (no nvme/m.2 pcie) Don't think the rest of the computer matters at this point really just looking for information on what raid card to get; - what's the difference between Controllers and HBA controllers - is there really a need to go full controller over adaptor (maybe this isn't even the right question) - What performance hits will I take going with a lesser brand then over the industry standard brands (LSI vs Intel) - is there any other specifics about raid cards I should consider before buying one that I haven't covered. - what if any software do I need to manage my RAID 5 setup such as in the case if I lose a drive do I need software to rebuild the array. - should I have a raid card with a battery to improve redundancy or is this too cost prohibitive for typical home use. - what exactly is RAID "code" (looks like it has something to do with the algorithm that controls which data goes on what drive but im not 100% sure) and does it even matter for what I am trying to do? - when buying a raid card is ideal to buy 2 of the same card incase one craps out? (see a lot of people ask this question no real answer) - when buying a RAID card is buying used (ebay) considered a bad idea (mostly asking in terms of saving money if possible if I dont need to spend upward of 2000$ that would be nice but if its a must its a must) any help is appreciated thank you very much. edit: been adding some more questions as I am looking for the answers so you may want to refresh every so often if you are considering helping.

I've looked all over the internet without much luck so maybe someone here can help me. I've had a NetApp DS4246 that I've had for a few months now, which I acquired from a reputable source. It has two IOM6s installed. I recently bought an LSI 9207-8e from a different reputable source and it came configured with firmware version 20. I also have a QSFP+ (SFF-8436) to Mini SAS (SFF-8088) cable which I'm convinced is fine (for reasons I'll get into below). I currently only have two 12TB SATA HDDs. I've been pulling my hair out trying to get this to work with my system for days now. I'm running Windows 10 Pro, and switching to a different OS isn't an option unfortunately. The behavior has been super inconsistent and erratic. 99% of the time, when I connect the disk shelf, only one of the two drives are detected. The behavior switches up from time to time but tends to stay the same for at least some duration. For instance, for a while, every time I unplugged one drive and plugged it back in, that drive would become the detected one, and if the other drive was the one being detected previously, it'd disappear from the system (not just unmount, but it'd be gone from disk management too). Then for a while only one drive consistently would take priority and if the other drive was reconnected, it'd have no effect. I could constantly unplug and replug the connectors and every time only one drive would come up, but on extremely rare occasion, both drives would connect and mount properly, and during those times, I've tested reading and writing to both drives. I found someone online who claimed to have been using the same HBA with Windows 10 Pro without any issues, and was able to get in touch with them. Turns out they were using an older version of the firmware, so I tried flashing the same firmware in the hopes that it would resolve the issue. After a few reboots and reconnecting everything, I thought it worked for a bit, but turns out it was just another fluke and shortly afterwards it went back to only detecting one drive. I tested another version of the firmware as well, with no luck. At some point during all this, the HBA was checked in its BIOS as well and it is detecting both drives. After a while, I of course began to suspect the cable, but this was quickly ruled out. Every time I boot into Linux, both drives connect immediately, on every reconnect of the cable. If I'm in Windows and only one drive is being detected, and I don't touch the cable at all and reboot into Linux, both drives are there. Same the other way. I also installed MegaRAID on Windows and its able to see that two drives are present in the disk shelf, even though Disk Management doesn't show it. By now I didn't really know what else I could test, so I purchased a LSI 9200-8e from the same source I obtained the disk shelf from. They weren't sure why I was having issues with the 9207, but they told me that 9200s are all they ever use and that they work fine in Windows. In fact, they demonstrated this for me firsthand when I was at their warehouse the first time around when I purchased the disk shelf. However, when I installed it into my system, I immediately had the same issues that I had with the 9207. I tested both cards in different PCIe slots as well with no change. Out of desperation, I tested the cards in an entirely different system I had on hand as well, and they behave the same way there too. What the hell is going on? I know these cards can work in Windows. There's numerous reports of this online, and both of my sources tell me this should be working as well. Does ANYONE know what I can do at this point?

Hey Guys, I'm planning on Building a Nas in a Node 804 Case, I've been looking around for decent uATX mobos and found myself hanging between Intel and AMD and the support for ECC. AMD unofficially supports ECC but mobos seem to be hit or miss. Do i even need ECC? I'm on a strict budget and I've been suggested B450 Aorus M and Asrock B450M Pro. All i want is a functioning Nas for Data Archival and Casual Plex usage. Having atleast 6 sata ports and PCie lanes that do not share bandwidth with either m.2 slots for GPU, hba and 10Gbe networking is also planned. Please help.

Hey guys, I'm from India and I'm planning on building a NAS on my Node 804 case and I'm having trouble finding hardware for it. I've been running plex on two wd 8tb drives on my old pc and never realized that one of them is dying. Fortunately, I have this uATX case lying around with a 550w supply and some ECC ram but I'm unsure about the mobo and CPU choice. I've honestly never built a nas before and had experiences where I lost important data. As the case provides 8x 3.5" cages and 2 other mounting positions for 3.5" drives i want a mobo with at least 8 sata ports and two additional m.2 slots for plex and unraid cache, both of which should not interfere with the sata ports, also, I'll be putting in a 1050ti, a 10Gbe adapter and maybe a hba sas card as well, so 3 PCIe lanes are mandatory. I don't have a lot of budget at hand, so please help.

Hello, I'm in the mix of creating a 50 disk array on a RAID card (still choosing but it looks to be the PERC H710P mini) since i'm going to be doing this on a R720. I may have to buy a separate RAID card such as an LSI card that has external sas so I can connect my DAS setup. I was wondering is it possible to utilize 2 similar raid cards or it has to be 2 of the same brand? If so by utilizing 2 RAID controllers will you achieve better reads and write performance combining the two?

Hello, I'm trying to do a NAS box for my home for storage. I'm thinking about utilizing a Raid Controller however based off the users on this forum, it seems that a HBA software solution might be even faster than a hardware raid depending on the number of disks and a combination of ZFS. I was wondering what will give me the highest speed possible, ZFS or a Hardware Raid setup? I have heard that with ZFS specifically for mechanical drives you can setup a RAM cache for your setup to dramatically increase speed, is this true?

Title is pretty much exactly that. I recently purchased an LSI 9207-8e, only to find out that it was improperly set up for use in a JBOD system, plus it has OLD firmware that I'd rather be upgraded. I made my efi boot medium, put the firmware and the BIOS in the USB, wiped the firmware of the card and tried to install the new Broadcom P20 firmware, only to be greeted by an error. NVDATA image does not match the controller revision. And it fails, endlessly. I've worked out that's because HP are asshats that can't be friendly to anyone and choose violence on a daily basis. Turns out that an HP rebranded card, even if it's the same physical hardware, will not accept anything that isn't an HP firmware update because reasons. Here's the current situation: 1. I have an HBA without firmware that's ready to accept firmware, no other problems. 2. Sas2flash will not flash Broadcom firmware to HP branded cards with release P15 or above. 3. Sas2flash will only ignore that it's an HP card and push the firmware anyway if it's the P14 release or earlier. 4. Broadcom never made a P14 release for UEFI as far as I can tell. 5. None of my hardware at home can support BIOS32 Service Directory (everything is UEFI), and thus sas2flash will not work on MS-DOS or FreeDOS, instead it will give me a PAL error. 6. I can't flash it via Windows without at least *some* firmware being in the card. 7. HPEs website is a labyrinth that doesn't appear to offer a full firmware file for me to flash. Essentially: I can flash it via DOS but I can't actually run the commands because my hardware isn't old enough. I can't flash it via UEFI since Broadcom didn't release an old enough version. I don't know what I'm doing wrong with Linux because nobody documents shit. Maybe HP has a firmware but I can't find it. Anyone got an idea on this? The Linux installer for this one just... doesn't work on Ubuntu 12.04 to 20.04, I'm defo doing something wrong but this is extremely poorly documented and I'm at a loss. Help appreciated.

I'm wanting to get an LTO drive to allow me to offload large amounts of Video file at a time for archival purposes and free up some space on my HDDs which. I seem to be coming across conflicting information in my research and wondered if anyone had any experience or insight into how the SAS protocol works and how it could be used for my purposes. Ideally I would like to get an LTO5 Drive and internally mount it to a Case with a 5.25" bay (I have an old Antec case which should do fine for this). The drive seems to have an SFF 8484 connector (which I believe is a backplane connector for when the drive is installed in a server/autoloader). I am struggling to find a suitable HBA to connect it to, I had found an LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA 9200-8i that looks to have a pair of SFF 8087 connectors and thought that an adapter from 8484 - 8087 would allow the drive to be detected and functional, but the sellers I have asked seem not to be sure. One also mentioned that they doubted that the HBA would be detected by the PC's Bios...but gave no reason as to why...is there something I'm missing here? I know that using (particularly older) LTO drives isn't exactly easy in Windows, but I do have access to an older Mac Pro if that makes more sense or of course am happy to run Linux on the final build of the LTO backup PC. Likewise I have found out that there needs to be sufficient air flow to keep the LTO Drive iself and possibly the HBA cool enough to operate. Any help would be amazing! Thanks

Hi everyone. I’ve got dell t320 with 8x3.5 bays without raid controller and already ordered perc h710. I’m planning to use hyper-v server/windows server as a host OS ant put there a vm with FreeNAS. As for storage I would pass 4x2tb Sata drives directly to vm and build a ZFS raid. Other 4 bays will be 600gb sas in hardware raid 10 and used for OS. Problem: As I understood perc h710 doesn’t have firmware to support pass through and only way is to create raid 0 and pass them. Idea: Backplane has 2 SAS cables so as I understood each one responsible for 4 bays. Can I add an HBA card(or perc h310 with it mode firmware) and connect one cable to perc h710 and the second one to the HBA so I will have 4 bays with the native passthrough? Thanks for your time!

Some time back I built myself a FreeNAS file server. Storage wise it has been running a 3x 3TB raidz1 (RAID5) configuration. Not long ago I implemented 10Gbit into it and the RAID has now shown me it's throughput limits. I plan to kill 3 birds with one stone. I plan to increase the redundancy (raidz1 to raidz2 or RAID5 to RAID6). I plan to increase to total capacity of the array (9TB total replaced with 16TB), and I plan to install 8 drives instead of 3 which will increase the total throughput and help utilize my newly founded 10Gbit link more. In total to compensate all of the drive bays I need 20 SATA ports. The motherboard has 14 but some are SATAIII, some are SATAII, some are controlled by the PCH, some are controlled by Marvel. It's all over. I know FreeNAS using ZFS could really care less about mixing drives on different controllers but I'd still like to put the whole RAID on one SATAIII controller. If SSD's ever get cheap enough I could replace all the disks and probably max out the throughput of the SATAIII controller. The other mishmash of ports on the motherboard will plug into the remaining drive sleds to be utilized for experimentation, wiping old drives and other purposes. I've heard of people taking old RAID cards and flashing the cards BIOS? Firmware? I'm not sure what it's called. By doing so converting it to an HBA but I really don't want to do that. I'm looking for a 8x SATAIII port PCI_e x8 card. I did research of my own and came up with this: SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 And then appropriate cables to go with it: 4-Lane mini-SAS to 4xSATA 7pin I like how it uses Mini-SAS and breaks out into 4 SATA ports. It only supports JBOD but I would basically just change no hardware configuration options and set up the RAID in FreeNAS with ZFS. Can anybody say that FreeNAS will respond irregularly to this card without me having to figure out drivers? Or does anybody have a card that they'd recommend over what I found? I'm willing to spend up to $200 but that has to include cables if the card doesn't come with them. All recommendations will be appreciated.

Looking for some HBA recommendations for a NAS server i'm setting up. Current Mobo is M5A97 LE R2.0 Link (Will eventually update this to a more proper board in the future.) Looking for a setup of 3 4port HBA's to eliminate SPoF in my array. Looking for cheap but not absolute crap. Found https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124064&ignorebbr=1 on sale on newegg which would serve me nicely in terms of ports per card and its connectivity to the system. Any advice would be appreciated.

Hi, I want to build a NAS box on a mini-itx platform, but the boards available for current APUs only have a single x16 slot (please let me know if any am4 or lga1151 itx board has this feature). I am looking at the ASRock AB350 motherboard and the A12-9800 for 4 cores and UHD output (I want the fileserver to also be the HTPC in living room). In my reading, I'd rather not use onboard SATA (can't find a board with 8 ports anyway). I want to install a LSI100301 (8-port mini-sas 8087) and use the forwrard mini-sas to sata (4 way) connectors to reach eight 3TB WD Reds. This frees me up to put 2 ssd's on the mainboard SATA for ZIL and L2ARC or to install another operating system besides Free NAS. WIll the LSI HBA work in a x16 slot meant for a GPU??? I want a four-core desktop cpu for plex transcoding, logging, and regular scrubbing, and security (my family will be putting medical records and some business backups on this). Thanks!!

So I have this chassis for my server https://www.logic-case.com/products/rackmount-chassis/4u/4u-server-case-w-16-x-35-hot-swappable-satasas-drive-bays-6gbs-minisas-+-2-x-525-bays-sc-4316/ it is currently populated with 12 sata drives using the built in ports on the mobo as well as a sata PCIe card as well as a startech card. If I want to add any more drives to the server I now need to buy another PCIe card to give me the extra slots. I would like to use the opportunity to get rid of the two expansion cards that are in there already and replace them with one card that will support all the drives. There are 4 SFF-8087 ports one for each row of drives. What I need (if it exists) is one expansion card that has enough ports for all 16 drives. The drives are all Sata 3 I don't need sas drives. Ideally I don't want to spend more than £200 on the card and I am not opposed to buying second hand. I don't need any raid functionality as all my drives are pooled using Transparent Raid from FlexRaid. it only stores media files and anything important is backed up on another drive plus crashplan central. I have a fairly good knowledge when it comes to building and buying a gaming system or but I am just getting into the enterprise hardware so I am still very much a novice when it comes to shopping for this hardware. I have had a look around but from what I can see the places that used to sell "affordable" 16 port HBA cards either don't sell them anymore or they are enterprise cards with features that I don't need. I have looked through ebay but buying server hardware isn't necessarily as easy as buying consumer or gaming hardware due to compatability issues and the assumption that you know exactly what you are looking for. Other information: Windows Server 2012r2 (possibly updating to 2016 soon) gigabyte z77-ud5h mobo 32GB ddr3 ram all drives are formatted as standard NTFS drives All drives are Sata 3 No raid system is connected to a UPS System runs 24/7 Plex Server/Nextcloud vm/Ark server/file server Any more questions or information I will answer as best I can Thanks for the help.

I have had unraid for just under a year now and finally getting my sh@% together and using it for more then Plex. Like a book server, personal wiki and a game server for games like Minecraft to start. I want to add 8 more drives and have used all the sata ports on my board. Now reading a lot about HBA and what I will need. I would like general feedback and also brand and model advice. Now my math was on the idea to not bottle neck all 8 drives at the same time. This seems like overkill because I can't think of a time when more than two drives would be needed but if you have insight into this please let me know. Rounding up about 5GB/s minimum will be needed for all drives at the same time. So here is what I found that I would need to cover this at the lowest cost. Using a SAS to SATA cable splitter to connect the 8 sata drives. This has me looking for HBA cards that fit this bill. 1) HBA card SAS-3 PCIE v3 6Lane 2) HBA card SAS-4 PCIE v4 3Lane HBA vs Raid Im using Unraid so an HBA should do the job just fine. But is there a feature of a Raid card that I could benefit from? Also there are internal 10 port SATA PCIE cards on amazon but I question the quality.

Hello, I'm just wondering who else on the forums owns one of these servers and has issues with noise due to the server kicking fan speeds up enormously when non-HP PCI devices are plugged in. What cards have you found that don't cause this symptom? I have been having trouble with an LSI HBA I purchased, and the original P420 RAID controller. The P420 doesn't spin the fans up due to not being properly recognized, but because it runs so hot. I did some reading and it sounds like running hot is pretty typical for that controller, though. Thanks for any help!

System: HP xw8600 Dual Xeon X5430 2.66GHz 28GBs DDR2 666Mhz FB-Dimm ECC ram GTX 710 (Basically a headless server) ROG 10G network card LSI SAS 9201-16e HBA 1x 250GB SSD (boot drive) 4X WD RE 4tb 4x 1tb Assorted drives 3x HGST 4tb Drives (trying to add) The system does see the LSI HBA I added but even in the BIOS config tool I don't see any drives. The HBA does show up under the SAS controller (which has a 2TB limit) I want it under SATA controller which I think is emulated on this board. I purchased a SFF-8088 to 4x Sata cable and it goes directly from the card to the drives. I read some things about this and something about Forward and reverse cables but nothing concrete. What is wrong??

I built a Plex server a couple years ago from my old gaming PC's internals (only one x16 slot) and I need to add a second HBA for another 16 drives, but all the MBs I'm finding with 2 x16 slots will only operate in x8/x4 mode when both are populated (each HBA needs 8 lanes). Someone at r/datahoarder did direct me to a workstation board that will work, the Supermicro X11SAT, but it's like $300 minimum on eBay. I was finding plenty of used 7th gen boards for around $50, though like I said none with the x8/x8 support I need, I just need to know which model # to search for. I'm really hoping to just find a gaming MB that will suit my needs since I don't need ECC support anyway (though yes I know I should for my current use case but I'm trying to save money). Actually it can be gaming or workstation, as long as I can find it relatively cheap used or new. Would really appreciate any help.

Hi guys, In this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAy9N1vX76o Linus is using 2 hba cards. I come across with this LTT video pretty recently. Because I've decided a while ago to build a NAS, I've thought to expand the number of SATA ports on my mother board, to use 2 x PCI-E to SATA3.0 Expansion Card Adapter (PCE8SAT-M01 8-Port PCI-E to SATA3.0 Expansion Card Adapter 6Gps PCI-E16X for Win). Now my question is: In a NAS, should we use SATA3.0 expansionn cards or HBA cards? Why should is choose one over the other. In what way the NAS effectiveness it will change? Thanks in advance!