I have an old Biostar z77 motherboard with an i5 3570k I’m repurposing into a home server. I want to set up a RAID array, should I stick with SATA or can get a SAS controller card so I can use SAS drives? Home network is Gigabit . I’ve seen some good deals on LSI 9200 series card but have no clue about driver support or flashing, I see a lot of mentions of 8i IT “pass through” mode. I Googled it, have a basic understanding but don’t know it will even be relevant in my needs case.
I could just go with SATA but I’d be good to expand my knowledge and experience base so I’m down for some experimentation even if it will outperform my home network. The controllers and drives seem cheap enough. Still, I imagine the drive to drive copying would be much faster.
You can get a SAS controller card and use SATA drives with it. I have no way of knowing, but I imagine most ‘home server’ folks use SATA drives with their SAS expanders. I sure do. I don’t see much benefit from using SAS drives unless I was shooting for storage controller redundancy, but my home setup hasn’t ascended to that level yet.
Be sure to check out 9300, 9400, 9500 cards as well. A buddy found a 9500 for surprisingly cheap, and I’m using 9400s in mine. I personally wouldn’t bother with 9200 since it’s a SAS2 card, but it would work just fine.
For software RAID, like TrueNAS, IT mode is very relevant. It’s something you should verify.
Linking basic info. Please use the ZFS terms. What is the use case for this system? How many drives are you planning? What kind of VDEV layouts? Mirrors, Raid-Z(1,2,3)? SSDs?
BASICS
iX Systems pool layout whitepaper
Special VDEV (sVDEV) Planning, Sizing, and Considerations
SMR vs CMR ServeTheHome
What’s all the noise about HBA’s, and why can’t I use a RAID controller?
Sure, that would work great. On ebay you can often find the cards already flashed to IT mode, but if not then it’s honestly not difficult to flash it.
To take a step back, if you only intend to connect four hard-drives to each SAS port on the card, a 9200 will be fine. A 9300 or newer SAS3 card likely would not give any performance benefit, but would offer more options for expansion, you won’t ‘outgrow’ the cables (SAS2 uses different connectors), and they probably use a few watts less power (though not significant. If the prices are similar, I’d opt for a SAS3 card. If not, the 9200 card will be perfectly fine.
So SAS2 and SAS3 cable connectors differ? I’m not familiar with any of them how can I tell what’s what when ordering cables? I’m seeing some SFF cables too, like 8639 type, is that something entirely different?
