Help with server
- Thread starter vintage-x
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Soldato
You can either get a sas card with 24 ports which would be pretty hard to find and very expensive, or get a basic 8 port sas card and a sas expander card. Ports are multiplied by 2 so a card with two physical connectors is listed as 8 ports. (as there are 4 channels per port, allowing 4 disks to run)
In my case, I've got a 8 port raid controller card (LSI megaraid 8888ELP) connected to a 24 port expander card. (Intel RES2SV240) I have the expander dual linked to the raid card which leaves 16 ports on the expander for all my drives. I could single link the expander, leaving 6 ports in total. (20 on the expander and 4 on the raid card)
In my case, I've got a 8 port raid controller card (LSI megaraid 8888ELP) connected to a 24 port expander card. (Intel RES2SV240) I have the expander dual linked to the raid card which leaves 16 ports on the expander for all my drives. I could single link the expander, leaving 6 ports in total. (20 on the expander and 4 on the raid card)
Soldato
Difficult to know. There certainly are duds out there. I had the same quandary with various 10Gbe network cards. I chose to stick with uk only hardware as it seemed a safer bet, particularly if something went wrong and it had to go back.
With respect to HBA's, the most common choices seem to be IBM M1015, Dell H310, HP H220 and LSI 9207-8i, though I'm no expert as I went the hardware raid route. If you go with an expander, choose carefully as some brands are not necessarily compatible with all controllers. The intel expander I bought is simply an LSI expander rebranded as intel and works with most lsi series cards, although not all. Weirdly, it worked out of the box with my really old 8888ELP but stopped working with it after I did a firmware upgrade on the raid card, so I had to revert the firmware. There is an HP expander out there too, but that is more fussy as it's a PMC made part IIRC. The intel expander is generally a safe bet with any LSI 92xx series card and any OEM branded versions of them under their IBM/Dell/HP/Fujitsu names.
With respect to HBA's, the most common choices seem to be IBM M1015, Dell H310, HP H220 and LSI 9207-8i, though I'm no expert as I went the hardware raid route. If you go with an expander, choose carefully as some brands are not necessarily compatible with all controllers. The intel expander I bought is simply an LSI expander rebranded as intel and works with most lsi series cards, although not all. Weirdly, it worked out of the box with my really old 8888ELP but stopped working with it after I did a firmware upgrade on the raid card, so I had to revert the firmware. There is an HP expander out there too, but that is more fussy as it's a PMC made part IIRC. The intel expander is generally a safe bet with any LSI 92xx series card and any OEM branded versions of them under their IBM/Dell/HP/Fujitsu names.