LSI 9211-8i HBA

[ubern00b]

I figured this would be the best place to try and get an answer on this but if you think it is better suited else where please let me know.

I am planning a new NAS build based around an AM1 solution. The AM1 motherboard I am looking at provides a 16x PCI-E physical slot but only running 4 lanes.

The LSI 9211-8i HBA is an 8 lane card. I am wondering if anyone has any experience with running this card or one like it in a 4 lane PCI-E slot? In the GPU world it would work just with less bandwidth, which is absolutely fine for my requirements.

I just don't want to fork out for the hardware and have it not work or worse, be unstable.

Thanks!

 

[BlizzardX]

The same would occur here, the card would negotiate the lower link speed. Overall bandwidth would be cut in half assuming its pci-e gen 2 or 3; generally for spinning drives you need a lot of drive to saturate even the reduced link speed; I recall it being around 2000MB/s roughly which is 13 hdds with a transfer rate of 150MB/s. Even then, mixing SSDs won't really cause too much issue either as most transfers are well below the maximum speed.

 

[ubern00b]

Awesome, thanks. I will be running 6 drives initially but I will flash the card to IT mode and will be using either unRAID or Drivepool, haven't decided yet. So, these technologies only utilize one drive at a time so bandwidth saturation is very very low on the scale anyway.

Just wanted to confirm it will (should) work. Thanks again!