Advantages of a storage controller

[PeterG]

I am working on piecing together a NAS (to run FreeNAS), unfortunately I don't have much prior knowledge about this sort of thing so I am coming here for more help.

 

Much of what I am reading, especially in the FreeNAS documentation, talks about using a storage controller.  But as far as I can tell, as long as the mobo has enough SATA ports then the storage controller is optional?  What does the storage controller do other than add the extra SATA ports?

 

If it's relevant, my current plan is an old Dell Precision T5400 w/ dual Xeon E5420's, and two Seagate Ironwolf 4TB NAS drives, I am looking at the LSI 9207 storage controller.

[Kiyometa]

Now I don't have any experience with FreeNAS, but I use Unraid and have a 4 port SATA PCI e Storage controller for some extra drives I have in there. So perhaps if you are only using the two NAS drives its not a big deal and you may not need it. (I have 8 drives in my Unraid server.)

[Electronics Wizardy]

No reason to add a hba unless you need sas or more ports here. The onboard sata will work fine here.

[Salv8 (sam)]

the storage controller does exactly what it says on the tin, controls the storage, more specifically, it organise's the storage coming from and to the rest of the system

for example, graphical data going to your GPU...

consumer ones use the main processor as a processing unit for the storage controller, more advanced ones have their own proprietary one allowing for faster transfer speeds from multiple requests to multiple drives at once.

this is a great thing to have in a file server that serves multiple files to 50+ clients at the same time. but for a single user...

not worth it unless you are planing a RAID 0 and are holding video files that you are editing on the server from another computer via a fast network connection.

my server does have one, but it came with it when i got it, mine is the LSI Adapter SAS 30001064E 4 port mini PCIe,

from what i read it can handle up to 75 simultaneous clients, in 2008, it's 10 years old, the damn thing can barely handle one client, thats why it's a cache for my server for torrents and plex.

your onboard controller will be fine, but upgrading to a faster one is a good idea if you are serving multiple clients simultaneously or are editing off the server via a network connection or similar work load