SAS controllers

[BlizzardX]

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?

 

[BlizzardX]

For what its worth, I just picked up an HP P400 Raid card from ebay which supports 8 drives on 2 channels. Cost £15

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?

 

[BlizzardX]

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.

 

[BlizzardX]

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!

 

[BlizzardX]

Will. Do should be here by the end of the week.