I am planning to upgrade my TrueNAS hardware.
The system has the following drives (all SATA3):
I am wondering if this would be a good choice for an HBA?
I am in Canada, so my choices are more limited due to shipping/custom costs/issues.
I can’t say if this is a good choice or not, but someone will chime in. My first thought was, did you read the specs? Manufacturer name, etc? Notice a problem? This appears to be a fly-by-the-night seller that is forced to stop selling onder a previous name and created a random name to bypass the restriction. This reseller will likely be shut down again in a few weeks or so. To me, this is a HUGE red flag. My advice, do not buy this. Probably counterfeit.
Someone else should be able to tell you if a “genuine” version of this card would be suitable.
I do have a question… What are you replacing? Or is this just an add-on? And why the “upgrade”? What more do you expect to obtain?
9300 is two 8i chips glued together so often it runs very hot. You either need to put a cooling fan on top of radiator or try to get more modern designs like 9305 or 9400
Lots available in eBay in China and being in Canada is totally irrelevant.
Regardless of whether the HBA is good or not, you absolutely need to confirm that your WD Red drives are NOT SMR drives (which are absolutely unsuitable for ZFS redundant storage due to bulk write performance limitations).
I had the same thought last night as well.
Thanks for the input. Yes I am aware. The drives in question are in service now and working fine.
I am using an old i7-3770 machine with an SAS2008. I am swapping it out for an i7-8700 which is a PCIe Gen 3 bus, so I though that if it doesn’t cost too much that I would go for a Gen 3 capable HBA. The reason for the extra ports is that the old mobo has 8 SATA ports, and the new one only has 4, and I need a spare port for my removable backup drive.
Thanks I’ll take a look at hose and see if I can find something that fits budget. I don’t want anythiing that requires active colling because of the noise.
Absolutely a valid reason. I just wanted to make sure you were not doing it to gain more speed, which could be the wrong decision depending on how you plan to use the device in the future.
Good luck with your project.
Thanks for the reply and the question.
While speed would not be the main reason, would I not expect a speed increase going from a Gen2 to a Gen3 HBA in a Gen3 slot? (8 WD Reds in RaidZ2) IIUC Gen2 is not fast enough to saturate the drives. Am I missing something?
Unfortunately this is not possible even with 9400 16i board. Those LSI controllers just love to run hot like there is no tomorrow.
Possibly, but saturating the drives is probably not what you should be looking at, well hence more questions.
Are you trying to increase Network throughput? If yes, what is your NIC speed?
If 1Gbit, nope, it will not improve your speed in my opinion. if 10Gbit, it might.
If you are trying to increase throughput between VMs within your TrueNAS machine, yes it may also increase there as well.
Now for drive saturation speed, have you done any dd testing to verify random data throughput speed? This will give you an idea of the maximum the tested drive/pool can achieve. Then you can compare if it will saturate your NIC connection.
My advice to you is, unless you are really gaining something that you need or just really want, the addition of the new HBA will only draw more power, generate more heat, and you will need to ensure proper cooling (keeping in mind that these things are really designed for a High Airflow Case. Keep it simple if you can and you will be better off.
Thanks again for the input. I just ran this at the command prompt:
$>dd if=/dev/random bs=1048576 count=500000 of=junk.bin status=progress
^C104361623552 bytes (104 GB, 97 GiB) transferred 323.001s, 323 MB/s
99780+0 records in
99779+0 records out
104625864704 bytes transferred in 323.817921 secs (323100909 bytes/sec)
I killed it off before it finished - data rate was not changing and then read the file back to /dev/null
FN$>dd if=junk.bin bs=1048576 of=/dev/null status=progress
104594407424 bytes (105 GB, 97 GiB) transferred 178.005s, 588 MB/s
99780+0 records in
99780+0 records out
104626913280 bytes transferred in 178.042333 secs (587651890 bytes/sec)
Is this a reasonable estimate of the maximum throughput to the pool?
If so IIUC that would more than saturate 2.5G ethernet. Have I got that right?
Yes to answer your question that you can support 2.5GbE.
You wrote at 323 MB/s
You read at 588 MB/s
Theoretical Maximums are:
A 10GbE connection passes 1250 MB/s (actual is ~8-9Gbps)
A 5GbE connection passes 625 MB/s (actual is ~4.5 Gbps)
A 2.5 GbE connection passes 312 MB/s (actual is ~2.3 Gbps)
And I just pulled those values off the internet. I know that depending on the applications, hardware, and cabling that these all affect the actual values.
Some reading you should do so you can understand why the pool may need to be changed for anything above 2.5GbE:
There is a lot of information out there in the TrueNAS forums about how the Pool layout affects read and write speeds, it is very important to understand it. But for now, you should be able to fill the 2.5GbE connection. And you did the random test, you should also try urandom and zero. urandom is more like actual random as I understand it, and of course zero means compressible data so it should be very high there, and not a test to show real world results, but it is pretty to look at and dream things are that fast.
Hope this helps some.
Thanks again… I actually did the test with /dev/zero, and I didn’t bother to post it because I doubt very much disk access happened. ZFS just compressed it all. I wrote a 500GB file in a bit over a minute, and the unused space didn’t drop much, so I figured this was no way to test the HBA/Disk…
Yes, helps a lot… I think if I can get away with it I will just keep my current HBA and just upgrade the CPU/Memory for running containers which is something I have wanted to do for a few years, but wasn’t easy for me to do with CORE.
Docker and LXC is so much easier to handle. The only thing I really need to move is a Syncthing jail – which I will convert to a Docker container.
While looking for that new motherboard (if you are) and CPU and RAM, also think 10GbE and built in SATA/SAS ports. If you could kill 2 birds at the same time, and if it is cost effective, why not?
Just read the product manual always before purchasing. I saw this one add for what looked like 8 SATA ports + 7 SATA ports + M.2 slot. Well it was 8 ports total, and it was poor wording on the advertiser. Good thing I read the User Manual.
Then, do NOT use a HBA…
Budget doesn’t really allow new stuff… got an i7-8700k CPU+Mobo for $150CDN, so all I need to do is throw some RAM at it, and it’s a nice upgrade from the i7-3770 I am running now. I can put 128GB of RAM and possibly a couple of NVME’s (for VM images), and I’m good to go.
Thanks again for all your input…
I’ve been running on passively cooled SAS2008 HBA for about 10 years and it hasn’t had any heat problems.
I tell people all the time. Buy surplus HP or Dell Servers that have the features you want for a whole lot less. For instance, a DL380g9 server controller has HBA or RAID modes you will want. Same card and it works great…You can buy a DL380 with LFF (3.5" drives) for $250 or so, and I’d recommend keeping the drive size toward the smaller size in the range you want. Why? because you will want to use RaidZ2 for data integrity. Loose up to two drives without loosing your whole pool. WOW… but that costs you in TB’s. The larger your drives are the more you loose… more 4TB drives is better than less 8TB drives for this reason. YES the servers are large and make some noise, but not horrible. I use a DL360g9 server with a couple drives in it for my main desktop. Why? because of dual PSU’s. Quad Gigabit NIC. Adequate cooling and good thermal design. Yes some of the consumer CPU’s and RAM sounds so enticing, but 64G of ECC DDDR4 comes with many machines priced under $250. I don’t need a lot of space so 8 or 10 SFF (2.5" drives) that are 1.2T are just great for me for a Nextcloud and a Plex… Think it over and choose wisely.
You neglected to say what your ambient temperature is.