Guidance on HBA/Expanders for new build

TrueNAS General
,
1

Hello all,

Rebuilding my TruenNAS server to use less power. I am currently running a r730xd with 16 hdds, some NVME, and ssd OS drives.

This is more or less strictly a NAS server outside of the few docker containers I am running for the *arr stack, but with intel quick sync I want to put plex in docker as well so I can get rid of my NUC.

I have all the hardware picked out, it’s the HBA/Expanders that always trip me up. I am using a Chinese 4u 24hdd case, if someone can guide me on which HBA/Expanders to get that would be greatly appreciative. I can keep my HBA330 if I need to…or buy something else.I also included the hardware I plan on buying incase there are any red flags.

case: 4u Rackmount Server Case With 24 Hot-swappable Sata/sas Drive Bay,Minisas /sata Connector - Buy 4u Hot Swap Server Chassis,24 Bay Server Case,Case Rackmount 4u Product on Alibaba.com

Intel Core i5-13500 2.5 GHz 14-Core Processor
Gigabyte B760 AORUS ELITE AX ATX LGA1700 Motherboard
G.Skill Ripjaws S5 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-5600 CL36 Memory
EVGA 1000 GQ 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply

2

I have a 9400-16i. Got it for $100 new. Lenovo brand and flashed to latest firmware. It uses around 10w no matter what; I have 12 drives connected to it in my build. It has been extremely stable for multiple years and I get very high performance from it.

Back when I was a noob, I had multiple jbod cheap amazon pci->sata adapters for 8+ years and never had a problem either. They use considerably less power.

A lot of people are using the ASM1166 m2->sata adapters. By all accounts they are stable, but on power-up sometimes the drives don’t get immediately recognized at boot / bios flash screen. These adapters do allow your CPU to enter c6/c7 power states. The HBA 9400 will NOT allow anything beyond C3 state.

Hope this helps. My recommendation is for the 9400-16i but its not a low power solution.

3

I cannot follow the link to look at your chassis: Alibaba refuses to serve here.
Assuming this is a passive backplane and requires 24 ports to serve 24 HDDs, all you need (beside cables) is an expander card to pair with your HBA330, such as the AEC-82885T.

4

I need something with a 8087 interface, ended up getting a different chassis since it has 2 ports for all HDDs vs 1 port per row…I cant use my HBA 330 since its a 12 gig connector

5

If there are two ports to serve all drives the backplane has a SAS expander.
Two SFF-8087 to SFF-8643 cables would do. There’s no need to change the HBA.