hba HBA Unraid

[CornBreadCuban]

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. 

 

[Jarsky]

Why do you care about the speed of the HBA, when you're using UnRAID?

UnRAID is limited to the speed of individual disks so you will never saturate it with SATA drives. 

 

PCIe Gen4 HBA's are pretty much non existant so far, and those that are I think you'll find practically no support for them. You'd also need to use NVMe drives to make the most of them which would be prohibitively expensive and unnecessary for home use

 

If you're using mechanical drives, then any SAS3 (6Gbps) card will work fine. If you want to add SSD's to it for caching then get a SAS4 (12Gbps) card, but keep in mind the SATA interface is still limited to 6Gbps. Also keep in mind that UnRAID's "cache" is for write only. 

 

If you want speed, reliability, affordability and compatibility stick with the tried and true. 

LSI/Broadcom 9211-8i and its OEM variants (6Gbps)

LSI/Broadcom 9311-8i and its OEM variants (12Gbps)

Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 (6Gbps)

Highpoint RocketRaid 2720 (6Gbps)

[CornBreadCuban]

14 hours ago, Jarsky said:

 

Thank you for your feedback. Yes Sata was the only bottleneck I was ok with due to the only drives I will be using. But correct me if i'm wrong here because i'm still learning. But 6Gbps = 750MBps. With 4 Sata drives to one SAS this would saturate the port?

Thank you for the card suggestions. I was looking at LSI but didn't know the brand. 

[Jarsky]

7 hours ago, CornBreadCuban said:

Thank you for your feedback. Yes Sata was the only bottleneck I was ok with due to the only drives I will be using. But correct me if i'm wrong here because i'm still learning. But 6Gbps = 750MBps. With 4 Sata drives to one SAS this would saturate the port?

Thank you for the card suggestions. I was looking at LSI but didn't know the brand. 

Thats 6Gbps per channel. A 2 port card has 8 channels = 48Gbps

[Salacious B Crum]

This is the card I put in both my unRAID boxes and were turn key right out of the box you will need breakout cables

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-H310-6Gbps-SAS-HBA-w-LSI-9211-8i-P20-IT-Mode-for-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/162834659601?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649

[CornBreadCuban]

On 8/24/2019 at 10:16 PM, Jarsky said:

Thats 6Gbps per channel. A 2 port card has 8 channels = 48Gbps

OMG yep that would do it. That was my oversight. lol