Hi everyone,
I have assembled a box of bits, intended to become my first NAS (bare metal w/ Scale), and I noticed a potential problem…
The LSI SAS 9300-16i PCIe to 12Gb/s SAS HBA card is PCIe3 x8.
Will it still work in a PCIe3 x4 slot (x16 slot, wired x4 electrically)?
If it will still function, what capabilities are lost?
Thank you!
Jacob
Yes.
Half the bandwidth to the host, which is probably not a big deal.
@ericloewe
Half of the bandwidth, not half the drives? So it will still handle 16 drives, but slower… Hmmm… I can live with that. Thank you!
Next question… Since the card has 4 ports, can I mix the attached drives?
Meaning, with the right cables, can I connect both SAS and SATA drives? (I am thinking about a fast pool with SSDs and a larger pool with HDDs.)
And 4x PCIe Gen 3 is about 4GB/s
The card has four connectors, I wouldn’t call them ports per se since they’re four individual lanes each, which can be used independently. And yes, you can mix SATA and SAS drives.
“Fast” is going to be relative when you only have four lanes of PCIe 3.0 for the whole controller, which is the same as a single typical NVMe SSD (and easily saturated by many these days).
Yes. You can mix drives. Sata and sas.
You can even use a sas expander to fan out to even more drives (sas and sata)
Or redirect a port or two externally and add another drive shelf with a built in expander 
BUT you may want that 8GB/s bandwidth then
Thank you everyone!
(Now to figure out how to call this one solved…)
