Motherboard ports vs SAS Card Ports vs Hybrid Mix of both???

[jstore]

I am treating my TrueNas Core box to a HW upgrade. I am not sure I gave much thought to which ports I used when I made it.

Today I have 8 drives

• 4 use the motherboard ports (2xboot pool 256GB, 2xSSD pool 2TB)
• 4 use a 92xx SAS Card (data pool 80TB)
• It seems to work just fine and I've never heard a complaint or experienced one.

New config will have a 93xx card and onboard ports as well. All are 12Gb, but I will be using the existing drives. I will be adding another 8 drives (need another SAS card) in a few months.

Does any have guidance or ever test onboard ports vs SAS Card vs mixing the two? I searched around and saw a lot of comments that seem to be inconsistent on what might yeild the best results. I am open to any thoughts whether they be performance, redundancy, protection related that would be considered a best practice.

 

[Davvo]

Main guidance:

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

If you want to virtualize, the HBA is a must have.

As far as I know, if you run bare metal there is no issue in running mixed (HBA and motherboard ports).
It might be worth from a resiliency point if you use mirrors, besides that the main difference is the increased power consumption with and HBA compared to using the motherboard ports. And maybe the need of a fan.

 

[jstore]

Thank you. I thought about something like the Asrock X99 Extreme 11 Motherboard since it has 18 onboard sata ports but it seemed as though every "serious" user out there was using an HBA. I am going to have 2 HBA's so I think I will put all the drives on HBA's but split pools across the HBA's for redundancy. That way if I loose and HBA, I am still up and running.

 

[Davvo]

Asrock X99 Extreme 11 Motherboard

It uses an LSI SAS 3008 controller, so you would likely be fine even withouth HBAs.