Help finding SAS/SATA controller

[Stonelesscutter]

So I got 4 SilverStone FS304 bays which offer space for 4 hard drives each, totaling room for 16 drives. I believe I will now need some kind of SAS/SATA controller in order to connect it all up.Now here's where I could use some help, because I have absolutely no idea what to look for. The plan is to use Unraid, by the way, if that matters.

 

What I'm looking for is one or more examples of a controller which could work for me. Would appreciate any suggestions.

 

Pointers as to things I need to look out for would also be welcome. Like, for example, do I need to look for specific features in a motherboard in order to be able to use a suitable controller? Or is any motherboard with a PCIe slot suitable?

[Electronics Wizardy]

a LSI HBA is what you want. Something like a dell h200/h310, or a 9200-8i is what you want. All are aound 30-50 usd on ebay.

 

Whats the full system? Any board should work.

[Stonelesscutter]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

a LSI HBA is what you want. Something like a dell h200/h310, or a 9200-8i is what you want. All are aound 30-50 usd on ebay.

 

Whats the full system? Any board should work.

The full system is not known yet as I'm still working on the complete design. It will probably be a Ryzen 3 or 4 series processor, an Nvidia or AMD graphics card, large NVMe SSD drive for the main drive and these hard drive bays for mass media storage. The idea is that'll both be a gaming system and a media server at the same time.

 

I'm finding the Dell PERC H200 for between 200 and 300 pounds whereas the Dell PERC H310 seems to be about 50 pounds. Why is there such a big price difference if these models are comparable?

 

Is LSI HBA a brand and model or is it a type of card? If there is jargon involved, I will probably not be familiar with it.

 

The 9200-8i seems to be an 8-port device. Does this mean I would require two of these, or is there some way to double up on each port?

 

Sorry for all the questions, I'm rather lost.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Stonelesscutter said:

The full system is not known yet as I'm still working on the complete design. It will probably be a Ryzen 3 or 4 series processor, an Nvidia or AMD graphics card, large NVMe SSD drive for the main drive and these hard drive bays for mass media storage. The idea is that'll both be a gaming system and a media server at the same time.

 

I'm finding the Dell PERC H200 for between 200 and 300 pounds whereas the Dell PERC H310 seems to be about 50 pounds. Why is there such a big price difference if these models are comparable?

 

Is LSI HBA a brand and model or is it a type of card? If there is jargon involved, I will probably not be familiar with it.

 

The 9200-8i seems to be an 8-port device. Does this mean I would require two of these, or is there some way to double up on each port?

 

Sorry for all the questions, I'm rather lost.

Do you plan on doing gpu passthrough? That can be a pain. Id probably just run windows on it if you want to game

 

The h310 and h200 are basically the same, slight changes, get what is cheaper.

 

LSI was a company, hba is a type of card.

 

You can get splitters or a 16 port version of the card.

[Stonelesscutter]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Do you plan on doing gpu passthrough? That can be a pain. Id probably just run windows on it if you want to game

 

The h310 and h200 are basically the same, slight changes, get what is cheaper.

 

LSI was a company, hba is a type of card.

 

You can get splitters or a 16 port version of the card.

I had understood that I could run Unraid as the base OS handling the media server and still run Windows on top as the main user interface. If this is a misconception, I need to completely rethink things.

 

If I were to use splitters to connect two drives per port, would the result still be the same as using 16 seperate ports? Does splitting the ports cause potential issues with data storage or transfer? Like maybe slower read/write speeds?

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Stonelesscutter said:

I had understood that I could run Unraid as the base OS handling the media server and still run Windows on top as the main user interface. If this is a misconception, I need to completely rethink things.

 

If I were to use splitters to connect two drives per port, would the result still be the same as using 16 seperate ports? Does splitting the ports cause potential issues with data storage or transfer? Like maybe slower read/write speeds?

You can do that with unraid as the host, but you can also run windows on the host, and still host a media server on windows, and play games. Its much easier to setup, and you can do the same type of storage setup on windows aswell.

 

Since your using hdds, the performance will be the same, as hdds can't come close to filling a sata connection.