SAS controllers

BlizzardX

BlizzardX

BlizzardX

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I'm looking at getting a SAS controller for my home server that supports 8 SATA drives. I can pick up an older LSI card (LSI MegaRAID SAS 8308ELP) for a reasonable price, but I don't know how different it is to say the IBM M1015.

I'm only looking at passing through discs so I don't intend to raid at all so do I really need 6Gbps per channel or would SataII speeds do fine for standard mechanical discs?

Any other recommendations for cheap SAS controllers?
 
For what its worth, I just picked up an HP P400 Raid card from ebay which supports 8 drives on 2 channels. Cost £15
 
Boycie said:
For what its worth, I just picked up an HP P400 Raid card from ebay which supports 8 drives on 2 channels. Cost £15
Click to expand...

Hmmm that is interesting... I don't intend to use the Raid function at all as I have many mixed size discs and I don't need the performance of a raid array.

How is it performing at the moment? Does it have SMART support and direct passthrough of standard drives?
 
I'd personally stick to a LSI 2208 SoC or if you can run to the extra one based on the LSI 2308 SoC. The M1015 runs a 2208 SoC and its performs very well given its price point but does seem to top out at 1500 / 2000 MB/s

Also running the M1015 with its IT firmware will run the discs in JBOD configuration, which is ideal for solutions such as ZFS.
 
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BlizzardX said:
Hmmm that is interesting... I don't intend to use the Raid function at all as I have many mixed size discs and I don't need the performance of a raid array.

How is it performing at the moment? Does it have SMART support and direct passthrough of standard drives?
Click to expand...

Cant really comment on performance because it hasn't arrived yet but i've used its little brother the E200 for nearly 5 years and its been fine. With regards to SMART support not sure what you mean but the card does support JBOD.

Thanks
B
 
Hi Boycie,

From what I have read some of the older controllers seem to not be able to pass the S.M.A.R.T. info from the HDD through to the underlying OS.

I'm just wondering really is the M1015 (or LSI one) actually worth the $80NZD more for me at this point in time.
 
Depends on your requirements but for me its not. I don't know a lot about the M1015 but from a quick comparison I can see it supports 32 drives whereas the P400 only supports 8. If thats important to you then go for the more expensive one.
 
I went for the lsi branded version of the m1015 as it supports up to 32 devices and sata 3 drives amongst other stuff. 125nzd delivered including the two mini sas cables to 8 sata drives. Perfect!
 
Excellent, do let me know how you get on as I could potentially kill 2 birds with one stone and plug the 4 bays from my microserver into one port and the 4 in 1 drive caddy into the other if I got one.

Thanks
b
 
[RXP]Andy;25552650 said:
I'd personally stick to a LSI 2208 SoC or if you can run to the extra one based on the LSI 2308 SoC. The M1015 runs a 2208 SoC and its performs very well given its price point but does seem to top out at 1500 / 2000 MB/s

Also running the M1015 with its IT firmware will run the discs in JBOD configuration, which is ideal for solutions such as ZFS.
Click to expand...

Hi Andy,

Think you mean the M1015 is based on the LSI SAS2008 chipset. just as the 9211 & 9240 are.

The older LSI 1068 based controllers are very much older tech which is why they are so cheap.

All three are a good choice (well they are more or less the same card with different firmware).

The Dell H200 or H310 are also fairly decent for an entry level card.

RB
 
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