Looking for advice/recommendations for a SAS PCIE controller, needs to run on Ubuntu 20.04

[flynn112]

Hi All!

 

Per the title, I'm looking for recommendations for some SAS PCIE card. I need to attach as many HDDs as possible, and am hoping to split each mini-sas into 4 sata ports. 

 

I've found several cheap (< $100 )6 mini-sas port cards on Ebay, but my understanding is that they're mostly EOL and I may or may not be able to get it working on Ubuntu. 

I've also found a couple of newer ones, but they routinely run in the $400-600 range. 

 

What should I be looking out for in terms of features / models ? 

Why is there such a huge price range for what seems to mainly be identical products ?

Do any of you more knowledgeable folks have good recommendations?

 

Thank you all in advance!

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Sas supports expanders, so you can take a single mini sas ports and connect hundreds of drives.

 

Id probably just get something like a dell h200/h310. Should work fine here and are cheap. Used one will be fine.

[flynn112]

20 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Sas supports expanders, so you can take a single mini sas ports and connect hundreds of drives.

 

Id probably just get something like a dell h200/h310. Should work fine here and are cheap. Used one will be fine.

Thank you!

 

If I understand expanders properly, I can grab a pcie expander and simply power it without needing to have it plugged in on the motherboard, correct? I have limited pcie slots, so that would actually be really helpful. 
 

Is there some upper limits to the daisy chaining? The drives will sit idle 99% of the time 

[Loki0111]

So because of Chia everything related to large scale drive expansion is starting to go up in price or is becoming harder to source used.

 

What it really comes down to is how many drives you are planning to run off the machine.

 

Something like a LSI 9207-8i with 6Gb/s SAS expanders will allow you to run something like 24+ mechanical drives or a smaller SSD array without any real performance hitches. If these drives are not doing much most of the time this is probably what I would recommend.

 

If you want to run a bigger array then that or one which is largely SSD's you may want to start to look at the 12Gb/s cards.

 

You can daisy chain SAS expanders. There is no real limit I've seen to how many you can chain but at higher numbers I'd have to assume you are adding latency.

[flynn112]

On 5/1/2021 at 3:23 PM, Loki0111 said:

So because of Chia everything related to large scale drive expansion is starting to go up in price or is becoming harder to source used.

 

What it really comes down to is how many drives you are planning to run off the machine.

 

Something like a LSI 9207-8i with 6Gb/s SAS expanders will allow you to run something like 24+ mechanical drives or a smaller SSD array without any real performance hitches. If these drives are not doing much most of the time this is probably what I would recommend.

 

If you want to run a bigger array then that or one which is largely SSD's you may want to start to look at the 12Gb/s cards.

 

You can daisy chain SAS expanders. There is no real limit I've seen to how many you can chain but at higher numbers I'd have to assume you are adding latency.

TYSM! I was able to purchase exactly what I needed! I'm waiting for the parts to arrive but I'm sure it'll work. Thanks for your help!