Reddit reviews SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+SAS Pcie 2.0
We found 32 Reddit comments about SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+SAS Pcie 2.0. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Product Type:SAS ControllerHost Interface:PCI Express x8
We found 32 Reddit comments about SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+SAS Pcie 2.0. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Raw storage:
Total 108TB(18 drives)
Actual storage:
Total 72TiB
Case:
Used the two bay 3.5" cage, and three bay 2.5" cage from the Deep Silence 3 case.
Fans:
Used two 120mm case fans from the Deep Silence 3 case between the two stacks of drives.
Motherboard: Supermicro X10SRA-F
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1620 v3 3.5GHz
Heatsink: Noctua DH-D15
RAM:
Total 48gb
PSU: Corsair AX1500i
Controllers:
Total 20 ports
NIC: Mellanox Connectx-2 10g
OS Disks: 2 x Intel 330 60GB, mdadm RAID1
Storage Disks:
Seven shucked from Best Buy WD easystore externals and two from Amazon as internals.
I originally shucked the Seagates from externals. I have replaced the Seagates as they fail, and I had one fail during this upgrade. Yes, I have had five Seagate failures.
SATA/SAS cables:
OS: Fedora 25 with ZFS for Linux
Cost:
The cost was spread across years. This is more like two builds in one. My old build with the motherboard, memory, heatsink, CPU, and 4tb drives combined with my new 8tb build. With the 4tb drives I have replaced five of nine drives over time, which has driven up the real total cost.
The case is huge, but all the space is nice. You don't feel like you are cramming anything in. I used a Fractal Design R5 for my previous build, and prefer Fractal Design cases to Nanoxia cases. But the biggest Fractal Design case wouldn't quite suit my needs. Even this was a stretch for the Deep Silence 6 case. I wish the Deep Silence 6 had spots to mount 2.5" drives on the back side like the R5. It is a feature I miss.
I have a few issues. The trays and the screw holes on the WD 8tb drives don't match. The WD drives are missing the middle bottom screw holes. My temporary workaround is strong 3M double sticky foam tape with two screws. I may use a drill and drill holes in the sides of the trays. I had to tape down the 2.5" cage, but the drives are so light it is not a big deal.
After building this beast I had the window closed, the door shut, and no room fan for one day. The room was quite warm. I have since opened the window, turned on the fan, and left the door open.
My Kill-a-watt peaked at 450 watts during boot. It idles between 200-220 watts. So I could go back to my AX760 from my previous build with SATA power splitters.
I still have one tray free, but no extra drive or SATA port.
I was originally going to move the four bay 3.5" cage from the Deep Silence 3, but it was just too integrated into the case. I tried adapting it, and it didn't come out well. Even if it had, the bottom tray was going to sit below the lip of the side of the case. So that tray would have been less accessible.
I am currently copying 18tb from the old array to the new array as a burn-in test.
I got the original idea to build with this case from someone else's post. I probably would have just bought another Fractal Design R5, and run two systems otherwise. I have run two systems for storage before, connected them with 10g, and used iSCSI. When I did I used, https://romanrm.net/mhddfs , to merge the filesystems together. I am considering doing the same again.
With the right cages you could probably fit around 26 3.5" drives in this case.
Over time I have gone from 250gb to 500gb to 1tb to 1.5tb to 2tb to 4tb to 8tb drives. I didn't think I would be upgrading to 8tb anytime soon, until the Best Buy easystore deal. In the past I mostly purchased on Black Fridays. In more recent years externals from Costco.
TLDR: I built a new server combining an existing 24TiB ZFS with a new array of 36TiB ZFS for the win!
As a bunch of people have already said, using a RAID card with ZFS is bad news. What you're going to want instead is a LSI 9211-8i flashed in IT mode. This will function as a simple HBA and give FreeNAS raw access to your drives.
There's a nice thread on the FreeNAS forums all about it.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/confused-about-that-lsi-card-join-the-crowd.11901/
edit: Here's the card I have in my build https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M
You can purchase something like this and then buy two of these breakout cables to add 8 HDDs without using any of the sata ports.
edit: added more info
Noise level is acceptable, I mean it's got quite a few fans in it, but you can mod it with noctuas if so desired, which makes it quiet as heck.
I bought this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RL8I7M, but you can get one (not this same model but the same chipset so they just flash the 9211 firmware to it) pretty darn cheap on ebay pre-flashed to IT mode (here's an example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-H310-6Gbps-SAS-HBA-w-LSI-9211-8i-P20-IT-Mode-for-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/162834659601)
LSI 9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+sas Pcie 2.0
Get a card like this and you can add plenty of drives. Note: you can find these much cheaper on eBay and often times will include a couple sas-to-4-sata adapter cables Also bare in mind they come in two flavors. One is raid-controller mode and the second is a simple expansion. But you can change that depending on how you plan to use it.
Consider a cheap SSD for your boot drive. Not necessary considering your needs but booting from an HDD gives me a migraine :)
I've used pcie sata expanders with mixed success, sometimes the hard drives would disappear and reappear on a reboot, you definitely don't want that to happen on a raid setup. An HBA flashed to IT mode with breakout cables works really well, I use it in my server and it is rock solid.
HBA
Cable
>M1015 IBM card
So something more like this: https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M
Cables: 2x of these: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-SFF-8087-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC/
SAS/SATA Controller Card: https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M/
You might find it on eBay for less. Just posting the Amazon links for clarity.
Plug the card into a free PCI-e slot on your mobo.
Plug the Mini SAS SFF-8087 connectors into the two ports on the HBA card.
Plug the SATA connectors into the back of your 5-drive hotswap bay cage.
Insert the HDDs into the hotswap trays (if it uses trays).
Turn things on. Bob's your uncle.
P.S. if you want PCI-e 3.0 version of the HBA card, you'll need to look for "LSI 93xxx" versions of the card. They're more expensive. Also, some others go for different manufacturer cards. I prefer LSI brand.
If you just want to RAID the whole thing, there are cheaper alternatives, but hardware level RAID HBA cards suck IMHO. With this type of HBA SAS/SATA Controller, you can basically pass-through the drives straight to your computer, and they'll show up as individual drives. Later you can then RAID them via software, or not.
That's not a bad system, but both the controller and backplane are SAS1. You'd need to upgrade if you plan on using any drive larger than 2TB.
That said, if you're goign to get a replacement controller, just get one of these, it's cheaper and doesn't require any flashing (it's the same card, but not OEM).
And you'd need a replacement backplane. Like this one.
S2D does not work with RAID-presented drives unless you hack up the registry to allow for any type of device to be allowed in the storage pool (probably the command you're speaking of).
Unless you are dirt-broke, I don't advise going down this path. You're gonna run into all types of storage issues due to the RAID controller doing it's own caching, etc.
I've used these cards in production and sandbox. I believe they're even on the MSFT HCL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RL8I7M/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
How many servers? If only 2, you should get some Mellanox Connectx-3 Pro's and just cross-connect between the servers. 10GbE switches (with or without PFC and all the other RoCE-required stuff) isn't cheap. I've gotten 2x ancient Dell R515 pushing over 250,000 IOPS with just HDD+SSD (no journal NVMe drives).
Here, try this
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002RL8I7M/ref=ppx_yo_mob_b_track_package_o1_img?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I was torn on it too, but I also liked I could have 8 3.5" drives and 4 2.5" drives if I wanted. All I'd need is a HBA card like the LSI Logic
SAS9211-8I (amazon.com) to run 8 HDD's plus onboard SATA ports. I also liked I could use the m-ATX and not be limited by the m-ITX as well. Most everything in my case is around 25-30c at any given time.
and on amazon it seems.
https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M
Which Quad M.2 adapter are you intending to use, specifically?
If you're wanting four NVMe M.2 drives, a typical passthrough style adapter (eg, requiring bifurcation) will be using 16 PCI Express lanes (4x4). This means that on an X470 board, the only slot it can occupy is the primary (top) slot, and you will not be able to use the secondary (x8 electrical) slot without disabling half of the NVMe M.2 drives on that adapter card. With a RocketRAID in your x4 slot, this means you'll either be running with no GPU or have it plugged into the second PCI Express x1 slot (as the Quad M.2 card will block the use of the first x1 slot). Not exactly ideal.
If it's a card using the ASMedia 2824 as a PLX switch from 4x4 to x8, it would work in the secondary slot (with GPU at x8 in the primary slot) but raises the question of whether it's worth it. The few cards like this on the market tend to be expensive, and additionally you'll be limited to about 7.5GB/s of total bandwidth at x8, largely defeating the purpose of utilizing four drives unless raw capacity is your goal. Some of these will expose drives to the BIOS, others will present as a device and require card firmware to manage things like RAID creation. Again, depends on the model.
For high capacity flash storage at still quite reasonable speed, it's (annoyingly) tough to beat SATA. Instead of 4x2TB NVMe M.2 drives on an expensive adapter, you could use a $50-75 SAS expansion card such as the LSI 9211-8i (in RAID or IT mode with a reflash) to connect 8x2TB or 8x4TB SATA SSDs.
The maximum bandwidth after overhead for usb 3.0 is around 500 Mbyte/second. With 28 drives thats a maximum of 14Mbyte/second per drive.
If you want to get totally serious (and want to invest), you could get one of these: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/
Otherwise use smaller hubs and pcie-cards for more usb3-ports, or get some of those: https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M
Amazon changed the link on me. I just grabbed it from my order history which was LSI Logic at the time. Perhaps they don't have any renewed ones to sell at the moment? Either way, to buy from them it is only $10 more. Looking back, when I purchased it, I only paid $50.
So if you look at the R720 Owner's Manual, you'll see that there are two SATA ports on the board. One is labeled
J_SATA_CD
and one isJ_SATA_TBU
, numbered 2, and 3 respectively. These are both standard SATA ports, but they're unfortunately SATA II, so only 3Gb/s. There is also a spot on the board listed asJ_SAS_PCH
(24) which you can plug in a SFF-8087 breakout cable into to give you an additional 4 SATA connections. This port is attached to the built in S110 "RAID" controller. This is sadly also SATA II.You can buy a SAS9211-8i card for under $100 that will allow you to connect 8 SATA III devices (you'll need a breakout cable), but you'll have to figure out how to power those internal 2.5" SSDs -- I didn't have to. I already had an m.2 SATA SSD, so I bought StarTech PCI card which has two m.2 SATA slots on it. Because this thing is bus powered, I didn't have to worry about how to power it.
I've seen some "LSI" cards/controllers thrown around on this sub, would this one work?
Something like this, but bought on eBay for cheaper and flashed to IT mode to just "passthrough" the drives to the OS and not do any management by itself.
And a couple of these to connect your hard drives. :)
Yea, my system is running Unraid with a few VMs then dockers for Plex, and some other utilities.
My issue is that I have very slow read/write speed to my drive array because I am going though the PERC 6/i card. My plan is to switch it out with a HBA card for direct access to the drives instead of going through the RAID card.
https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M
Try an LSI raid controller https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M/ref=sr_1_2?crid=P5PBSXR61CYV&keywords=lsi+raid+controller&qid=1569558454&sprefix=lsi%2Caps%2C171&sr=8-2
You will also need these https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-SFF-8087-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC/ref=pd_bxgy_147_img_2/136-5105212-8833038?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B012BPLYJC&pd_rd_r=89475179-7e61-4fe7-915a-198096ed13b8&pd_rd_w=QQkz9&pd_rd_wg=B6Ezg&pf_rd_p=479b6a22-70ae-47a0-9700-731033f96ce8&pf_rd_r=0A6F6Y69MVNJQX5XC257&psc=1&refRID=0A6F6Y69MVNJQX5XC257
Be sure to back up the data on your current raid because they will get formatted. After installing it you will see different boot process from the card when starting up your computer. It should tell you to hit ctrl-h (I think). After that just read carefully, choose your hard drives that you want to combine and choose the raid you want. After that boot your computer normally and install the software I linked below. Be sure to extract it before installing and use the complete installation. It might give you a login screen for the software. It will request your window's login credentials. I was wary of it at first too but its what it wants. My memory is a bit fuzzy. But I believe this is where you finish setting up the raid for windows to be able to format it.
I'm using an LSI Logic SAS9260-4I for raid 6. The only issue I've had with it is while I was installing windows I had to disconnect it. But once that was done once I reconnected it and moved on like normal.
edit: Went to the website for you and searched for the card's software management https://docs.broadcom.com/docs/12354760 that should be it.
edit2: added more information.
Board and CPU combo is good, enough single thread performance for the Minecraft server, enough multi thread for transcoding 3-4 1080p streams in Plex. (Rule of thumb is 2K passmark score per 10mb/s of video)
The board is just standard ATX size. It does only have 6 SATA ports, so you will need buy an HBA card to add more ports, or use fewer storage devices.
https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M
That card can handle 8 drives total, 4 per cable.
https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-SFF-8087-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC
PCPartPicker Part List
Type|Item|Price
:----|:----|:----
CPU Cooler | ARCTIC Freezer 34 CO CPU Cooler | $31.95 @ Amazon
Memory | G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory | $64.99 @ Newegg
Video Card | Zotac GeForce GT 1030 2 GB Video Card | $84.99 @ Newegg
Case | Antec Three Hundred Two ATX Mid Tower Case | $94.58 @ Walmart
Power Supply | SeaSonic FOCUS Gold 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply | $79.90 @ Amazon
Case Fan | ARCTIC ACFAN00119A 56.3 CFM 120 mm Fan | $8.52 @ Amazon
Case Fan | ARCTIC ACFAN00119A 56.3 CFM 120 mm Fan | $8.52 @ Amazon
| Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts |
| Total | $373.45
| Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-07-26 08:45 EDT-0400 |
CPU cooler to keep the CPU quiet. Bit of overclocking headroom if you want the extra performance. Compatible RAM. Basic GPU that will be able to handle any 4K 60Hz HEVC video decoding. Case with tons of storage room. Efficient power supply for low noise, and a long warranty. Extra 120mm fans for front intakes, to keep the storage cool.
I added this with these cables when I ran out of sata ports.
If you are looking for a new chassis The Rosewill RSV-L4500 one is a great choice if you have large dreams and small pockets. It will also pair nicely with a pair of 9211-8i
Used on ebay go for $20+ ... Herre's an amazon one I found under $100:
​
https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549300887&sr=8-1&keywords=lsi+8i
​
Admittedly, I threw the rocket in there because I'm a fanboy of 40 sata ports :) ... Ahhh, the possibilities...
https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M/ref=pd_ybh_a_30?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=QZ552F2XPHH64TJYWE61
https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-SFF-8087-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC/ref=pd_ybh_a_29?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=QZ552F2XPHH64TJYWE61
this should help
I’m sure there are better HBAs but we used these and they work.
SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+sas Pcie 2.0 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002RL8I7M/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_JX48BbCHS736B
>I was mainly thinking I could use the PCI express slot for another SATA card when the time came for upgrading, but again thats a future issue.
Don't go with a SATA card, use SAS. SATA cards are usually stuck to 1x slots and can only connect 4 drives (and even then the 1x slot can start bottlenecking you). SAS cards can connect SATA drives and they usually have more PCIe lanes so they will not be a bottleneck. All you need is a SAS card and SAS to SATA breakout cables.
What question do you have with the SSDs again?
Here is a fourm thread about your exact situation. Here is the card I use.
I would love to help. I noticed there wasnt a huge amount of support threads on this situation. Im really surprised that there isn't more info on it.
update: ordered this guy to pair up with the case - SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+sas Pcie 2.0 - http://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00
Fack. I've done the DOS method of flashing cards, it's a pain in the dick hole.
Thanks for the help M8.
I'm going to reach out to DDS and see if I can get these cards swapped for these.
https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8PORT-Int-Sata-Pcie/dp/B002RL8I7M