Looking to pick PCIe x4/x8 4+ SATA expansion card recommendation.

Hi,

I have upgraded my PC with new MB and it is begging to be made in to
full blown mdam server. I asked and got several recommendation for SATA expansion cards. The recommendations typically go for PCIe x1-2port type cards like this one

However, I am looking for something along PCIe x4/x8 with 4+ ports like this one

or (similar, but cheaper)

Any one has any experience? Are there some other recommended ones along this line. Basically, I am looking for non raid (I do not want pay for the HW RAID component which I will not use) easy to use expansion card with several ports that is reliable (I have this: www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124064 and it drops hard drives the moment I stress it)

Ramesh

I'm using an LSI MPT2 PCIe controller myself and it's working great. I paid around $150 on ebay a while ago for it, so the model you show should be just fine.

I'd be careful about buying off Ebay unless you know EXACTLY what you're getting.

And remember to buy the expander cables to go from the two ports on the card, two two sets of four SATA controller cables.

I just went back and checked, and I got the:

LSI 9211 SAS9211-8i 8port low profile 6Gb/s SAS Host Bus Adapter

which was a DELL brand controller. The 9207 is another model which is
also recommended, but this is from 2014 or even earlier. There might
be newer models out there.

I paid $123 plus shipping. Been very happy with it, not problems at all.

I searched your description and got this

Is this the one you are talking about? In my message I mentions this,

Mine is cheaper, so it worries me (BTW, for LSI 9211-8i, the prices are all over the place). Yours claims RAID capability (assuming IR firmware) and the other seem to be no raid (may be IT firmware)

Both are from China, and like you say, not sure what I will get.

Ramesh

Ram> I searched your description and got this

Ram> Is this the one you are talking about? In my message I mentions this,

That looks very much how I remember mine. Make sure you get a full height bracket when you order, that was one of the things I had to check as I recall now, since I have a full height tower system, not a 2U rack mounted system.

Ram> Mine is cheaper, so it worries me (BTW, for LSI 9211-8i, the Ram> prices are all over the place). Yours claims RAID capability Ram> (assuming IR firmware) and the other seem to be no raid (may be Ram> IT firmware)

I just flashed the standard LSI firmware from their site as I recall.
I disabled any hardware RAID stuff as well. Since I can't just
bounce the system to check, take what I say with a grain of salt.

Ram> Both are from China, and like you say, not sure what I will get.

I seem to recall I got it from someone in the US.

The other trick I did was to put all my data volumes on the LSI controller, and just a pair of SSDs onto the internal SATA controllers. This way I know which devices I'll boot from, and it made it simpler to know I had updated and setup GRUB properly.

You do want to test booting from a broken RAID1 boot device. When I recently did my big re-org, I found that to make it boot I had to move the working boot drive to the non-working slot, since of course the failed one was effectively /dev/first-drive and that's how grub needed to boot.

John

Your setup regime really should check that you install grub on ALL your drives. Easier said than done though when adding new drives ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Well, an 8 port card (like HP H220 or similar) is a bit too expensive if all you need is two more slots, and it's not like mdadm is picky - anything goes, well, as long as it meets minimum requirements (no I/O errors etc)...

If you're looking for something on an even larger scale, maybe have a look at the Backblaze Storage Pod blog posts. Although the hardware they use seems to be hard to get, it might give you some ideas.

They actually use port multipliers, I actually wish they were as widespread (and as cheap) as USB hubs, so we all could simply put three or four disks to a single SATA port, but alas...

Maybe next time.

Regards
Andreas Klauer

Andreas,

The two links I gave are about $120 and $80. If I used 2-port ones,
it will be too many (to get 8 ports) and my experience with marvell chipset cards (4-port) was not good. So, I thought LSI 8-port is better and reasonably priced. I also saw several feenas threads talking about these cards working well in linux. Do you see risk in buying these as they may not be what they claim to be?

Ramesh

Hi Ram,

Marvell

chipsets have a mixed history on this list. The SATA models have been nothing but trouble. But I haven't heard much about them lately. Maybe someone else can comment on recent performance.

The marvell SAS models were also trouble until the kernel drivers got some love in the past couple years. They're fine with current kernels. I ran one of them as a short-term boost for an old server until I built my most recent media server. It was 4.1 kernel I believe. I don't have a link to that card handy, sorry. (I gave it to a family member.)

LSI has a very good reputation on this list. The above is likely to be a very good choice. I have a similar unit in my media server:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0034DMSO6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Runs great. I did replace the firmware with the "IT" version so it would boot faster (no attempt to enable soft raid).

Phil