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Raid Card

Rabel
By Rabel
in Servers, NAS, and Home Lab
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Posted

Hello,

I was wondering if there is an Raid controller card with 8 mini SAS or mini SAS HD ports.

The best would be a Raid controller with raid 6, 4 external Sas Hd (sff 8644) and 4 internal Sas Hd (sff 8643).

i am serching a long time now and dont find one so im asking for help.

 

Thanks for the help.

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Posted

What are you doing here? normally you don't want a raid card and instead want a hba as software raid is normally better.

 

If you want a raid card with that many ports you just get a sas expander. No reason to have that many ports on a raid card when you can easily split them up.

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i want a raid card cause i need that speed and of cause it should be an hba with software raid i thougt it was logical. and i am here cause i dont found an raid card i want to juse and an sas expander is out of question for me.

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Well, there's software motherboard RAID, and then software RAID (ZFS, BTRFS, etc). ZFS is quite fast as it runs as the OS / directly controls drives. 

 

But yeah, I don't know of a sas card with that many ports onboard. Is there any reason why you can't use a SAS expander card? The cost of a SAS expander would be much lower than a RAID card with four internal SAS ports. 

 

What kind of setup are you running? (number of drives / type of drives)

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the onboard Raid is useless because it only supports raid 1,0,10 and 1E

and i am running dual Xeons and want to upgreate to 32x4 drives 

 

(there is a Raid card that supports 10 sas ports (rocket 750) but it is only PCIe 2.0)

 

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You're mixing up motherboard RAID vs true software RAID. ZFS is an actual filesystem that runs in Linux that controls the drives. 

 

But yeah, why not get a RAID card with two or four SAS ports, then get a SAS expander to expand out to how many SAS ports you need? You won't be hitting a bottleneck with hard drives (keep in mind SAS2 is four 6Gb/s lanes per port)...or 12Gb/s per lane if SAS3. Most RAID cards are typically able to handle 128+ drives with expanders

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the problem is that i have a maximum of 4 slots left and 32/4 is 8 and if i put 3 expander cards in i would nee 12 ports per card

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32 minutes ago, Rabel said:

the problem is that i have a maximum of 4 slots left and 32/4 is 8 and if i put 3 expander cards in i would nee 12 ports per card

no only 1 sas expander can normally have 4 in/outs for 12 drives from 1 input but some also have 6 in/outs for 20 drives

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1 hour ago, Rabel said:

the problem is that i have a maximum of 4 slots left and 32/4 is 8 and if i put 3 expander cards in i would nee 12 ports per card

SAS expanders don't need to be in a slot. They sell ones that are strictly powered by Molex.

 

However, even the card form SAS expanders don't need to be in a slot. They usually offer an alternative power source via Molex.

 

An example of a non PCIe slot expander:

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Storage-Controller-Upgrade-RES3TV360/dp/B00RQYHL6O/ref=pd_sbs_147_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00RQYHL6O&pd_rd_r=N53V6YRM1GXXR05BRXR7&pd_rd_w=LgcP1&pd_rd_wg=JzPDT&psc=1&refRID=N53V6YRM1GXXR05BRXR7

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6 hours ago, Rabel said:

Hello,

I was wondering if there is an Raid controller card with 8 mini SAS or mini SAS HD ports.

The best would be a Raid controller with raid 6, 4 external Sas Hd (sff 8644) and 4 internal Sas Hd (sff 8643).

i am serching a long time now and dont find one so im asking for help.

 

Thanks for the help.

You basically either need more than one RAID Card, or you need a RAID Card + a SAS Expander.

 

Why?

 

Because I don't know of any RAID Cards that have 32 channels. The largest LSI (now Broadcomm) RAID Card I could find was:

MegaRAID SAS 9365-28i

https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/raid-controllers/megaraid-sas-9365-28i#specifications

 

28i means it's 28 channel, and via Internal SAS connectors.

 

It has the following ports:

6 x4 SFF-8643; 1 x4 SFF-8654

 

Each port is quad channel, meaning it controls 4 drives per port.

 

You could, however, get a pair of 16i RAID Cards instead, or one RAID Card and a SAS Expander.

 

It really depends on your needs, and what you are trying to accomplish. Using multiple RAID Cards means you cannot use all drives in one large array (each array would be limited to say, 16 drives max, if you were using 2x 16i RAID Cards).

 

However, using a RAID Card with a SAS expander would limit total potential bandwidth - though realistically it probably won't be an issue.

 

If you want to use Motherboard RAID (known as "Fake RAID"), or true Software RAID (Such as BTRFS, ZFS, Storage Spaces, etc), then you need an HBA (Host Bus Adapter) instead.

 

LSI HBA's top out at 24 internal channels, max, so you have the same problem, get two HBA's, or get one HBA plus an Expander.

 

However, the good news with a pair of HBA's is that it's the Software creating the RAID Array, and therefore, it doesn't matter that drives are spread over two HBA Cards. You'll get max bandwidth potential still.

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