HBA/RAID Card

[noobftw]

Can anyone recommend a decent RAID card (capable of RAID 0, 1, 6 or 10) that can also be flashed to IT mode so it can be used as a HBA. So i would be able to use the card for a specific use case, they can be flashed back to original firmware i presume? 

 

Must be compatible with ESXi/FreeNas/Unraid/Windows 10

[Electronics Wizardy]

so do you want a raid card or hba, most are one of the other, with a few exceptions.

 

Id just get a lsi hba like a dell h200/h310, or 9210-8i

[noobftw]

13 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

so do you want a raid card or hba, most are one of the other, with a few exceptions.

 

Id just get a lsi hba like a dell h200/h310, or 9210-8i

I want a card that is capable of being used as a RAID card and a HBA (can be flashed with IT mode). 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, noobftw said:

I want a card that is capable of being used as a RAID card and a HBA (can be flashed with IT mode). 

IT mode is a LSI term, do you need a LSI card?

 

Normally raid cards will let you use disks in a jbod mode if you don't put them in a array, that should be fine here, correct?

 

How much raid performance do you need? A good raid card isn't cheap, and you need the battery too.

 

[noobftw]

20 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

IT mode is a LSI term, do you need a LSI card?

 

Normally raid cards will let you use disks in a jbod mode if you don't put them in a array, that should be fine here, correct?

 

How much raid performance do you need? A good raid card isn't cheap, and you need the battery too.

 

It will only be utilising 8x14tb drives. Am i right in thinking the HBA side of things won't really effect drive speed or cause bottlenecks (in FreeNas), as it's just passing the disks through right (the bottleneck will be the spinning rust), everything is done in software after that, no?

Even if using SSD's, depending on disk setup of course, i should be able to hit max speed on a 10GB NIC/Backbone. 

 

An LSI card will do fine, just need to find one that is appropriate.

 

Now, let's say i wanted to max out a 10GB network using 8 SSD's using hardware RAID (in let's say Windows 10 or something), would an LSI 9210-8i do that, or would i need a more expensive card?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, noobftw said:

Now, let's say i wanted to max out a 10GB network using 8 SSD's using hardware RAID, would an LSI 9210-8i do that, or would i need a more expensive card?

not in raid 6, those cards struggly in parity raid. You also need the battery for parity raid to get reasonble performance without the risk of data loss

 

1 minute ago, noobftw said:

It will only be utilising 8x14tb drives. Am i right in thinking the HBA side of things won't really effect drive speed or cause bottlenecks, as it's just passing the disks through right, everything is done in software after that, no?

Even if using SSD's, depending on disk setup of course, i should be able to hot max speed on a 10GB NIC/Backbone. 

 

If your just using it as a hba, the performance won't matter much, esp for hdds, but if you want raid, esp parity raid, you start to need a pretty nice card to get the full speed.

[noobftw]

8 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

not in raid 6, those cards struggly in parity raid. You also need the battery for parity raid to get reasonble performance without the risk of data loss

 

If your just using it as a hba, the performance won't matter much, esp for hdds, but if you want raid, esp parity raid, you start to need a pretty nice card to get the full speed.

I would probably run SSD's or HDD's, in a hardware RAID, in RAID 0 or 10 tbh.

 

What kind of card would you recommend for getting max performance using parity RAID? With the card also having the ability to be flashed to IT mode and used as a HBA? 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, noobftw said:

I would probably run SSD's or HDD's, in a hardware RAID, in RAID 0 or 10 tbh.

 

What kind of card would you recommend for getting max performance using parity RAID? With the card also having the ability to be flashed to IT mode and used as a HBA? 

 

If your gonna run raid 10 or 0, just get something like a used 9260-8i or h700. Then don't worry about the hba part. Get a hba later if you need one.  You can get newer gen cards like the 9361-8i if you need more bandwidth to the drives with sas 12g.