SAS9211-8I or not to SAS9211-8I, that is the question...

[PlowHouse]

I'm sure there's been a write up on this so if someone would rather reference an article then by all means that works. I have 6 - 2 TB WD Black WD2002FAEX 6 Gb/s drives attached to a motherboard sporting 6 - SATA III 6 Gb/s connections. I'd rather attach these drives to an HBA and I happen to have one lying around at home (some LSI HBA at 3 Gb/s) but I noticed the 9211-8I is highly recommended. However, most hard drives can't even come close to 6 Gb/s transfer speeds let alone 3 Gb/s so why recommend a 6Gb/s HBA for most spinning disks? I'm going to connect my other LSI card at 3 Gb/s and do some benchmarks compared to the current setup. My initial thoughts though are that the 3 Gb/s card is going to out perform the embedded 6 Gb/s ports on the motherboard however I'd like to get some thoughts surrounding this and if there is some golden reason to still look at the SAS9211-8I as an HBA solution with my current drives. I also don't have any plans to change these drives so to only buy a 6 Gb/s HBA for the future doesn't really apply to me in case I ever wanted to swap my current drives out for SSD's.

Thanks!

 

[BigDave]

so why recommend a 6Gb/s HBA for most spinning disks?

The chipset was proven reliable with FreeBSD's driver, it was and continues to be affordable and available.
To put it in a nutshell, it's been an able piece of hardware ;)

 

[SweetAndLow]

The 3Gb/s stuff is probably not going to support drives over 2TB in size.

 

[razvanc.mobile]

Is there any advantage on going through an HBA instead of the onboard sata ports?

Sent from my SM-N9005

 

[jgreco]

I'm sure there's been a write up on this so if someone would rather reference an article then by all means that works. I have 6 - 2 TB WD Black WD2002FAEX 6 Gb/s drives attached to a motherboard sporting 6 - SATA III 6 Gb/s connections. I'd rather attach these drives to an HBA and I happen to have one lying around at home (some LSI HBA at 3 Gb/s) but I noticed the 9211-8I is highly recommended. However, most hard drives can't even come close to 6 Gb/s transfer speeds let alone 3 Gb/s so why recommend a 6Gb/s HBA for most spinning disks? I'm going to connect my other LSI card at 3 Gb/s and do some benchmarks compared to the current setup. My initial thoughts though are that the 3 Gb/s card is going to out perform the embedded 6 Gb/s ports on the motherboard however I'd like to get some thoughts surrounding this and if there is some golden reason to still look at the SAS9211-8I as an HBA solution with my current drives. I also don't have any plans to change these drives so to only buy a 6 Gb/s HBA for the future doesn't really apply to me in case I ever wanted to swap my current drives out for SSD's.

Thanks!

Please see the LSI sticky in the hardware forum. The old 3Gbps LSI silicon has 32-bit issues accessing LBA's that limits drive sizes to 2.2TB. The 6Gbps LSI HBA's are fairly cheap insurance against trouble, plus they're totally awesome controllers.

 

[jgreco]

Is there any advantage on going through an HBA instead of the onboard sata ports?

Onboard SATA provided by Intel silicon, probably no significant advantage. Onboard SATA provided by Marvell or possibly others, yes, there could be. However, also worth noting that an HBA adds ~10 watts of consumption to your system, so if you've got Intel SATA ports on there, I'd say use them first.

 

[PlowHouse]

Forgot to mention that I'm currently getting

The chipset was proven reliable with FreeBSD's driver, it was and continues to be affordable and available.
To put it in a nutshell, it's been an able piece of hardware ;)

Makes sense since it's such a recommended card, still hard for me to justify dropping $200 on a card

Please see the LSI sticky in the hardware forum. The old 3Gbps LSI silicon has 32-bit issues accessing LBA's that limits drive sizes to 2.2TB. The 6Gbps LSI HBA's are fairly cheap insurance against trouble, plus they're totally awesome controllers.

Thanks for this write up article Jgreco, some good stuff in there discussing this topic and also providing a small tutorial on the cross-flash portion is very helpful!

 

[BigDave]

Makes sense since it's such a recommended card, still hard for me to justify dropping $200 on a card

The card does not have to be an HBA. I run a used IBM M1015 that was bought off ebay for less than $100.
In the case of the M1015, I did have to learn to cross flash the firmware on the card for use in FreeNAS as that
model was manufactured as a RAID card. In conclusion, buying the card used is common practice here in the forum
and can be found easily for much lower than $200.

 

[Fuganater]

Makes sense since it's such a recommended card, still hard for me to justify dropping $200 on a card

$200? I got all 3 of mine BNIB for less than $95 each on Ebay.

 

[PlowHouse]

Sweet deal, I'll keep that in mind then if I ever decide to go that route.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, prices were a bit lower a few years back, average was $75ish for awhile.