Will my motherboard support an intel raid controller

[Phill4321]

Hi all, I currently have a nas with 5 harddrives that all run through the motherboard. I have just ordered another 5 that will give me a total of 10 hard drives. I will need a raid controller for these and have found that the SASUC8I Intel RAID Controller works with freenas. I currently have an MSI P55-GD53 Motherboard that only has one pci express slot.

Theres a basic graphics card in the top pci express slot. My question is, will I be able to remove the graphics card and place the raid card there instead, or will I need a different motherboard that has a second pci express slot? Is there anyone else who uses this raid controller with freenas? And also does this raid controller support drives bigger than 2tb?

 

[Nikumba]

Most RAID cards are either PCIex4 or x8 so just bung the RAID card into one of those

 

[RimBlock]

Sorry but cannot tell you directly as I have not tested that combination.

THe SASUC8I is based on the LSI 1068e chipset (I have two now retired LSI 3081E-R cards). It is also a PCIe v1.0a card and is known to have some issues in some PCIe v2.0 slots. I have had a lot of problems finding motherboards which could cope with both of my cards at once until I changed the cards. Be prepared for it not to work as you have a PCIe v2.0 slot on that board but you may be lucky and it might be fine.

You need to put the card in the PCIe slot which means you need to sort something else out for display as you have just the one slot. For a server you can just grab a cheap PCI card and put that in one of the spare PCI slots.

Another option is to change the MB for one that is know to work with the card (the Asus P8H67 works fine with the card but has other serious issues so I cannot recommend it).

The final option, all be it a little late now, is to ditch the SASUC8I in favour of the IBM M1015 which usually pops up on EBay from new server pulls unused. This is more or less a LSI 9240 PCIe v2.0 SAS raid card with raid 5 disabled and IBM firmware on it. You can also flash it to LSI IT firmware if you wish to remove the read abilities and, alledgily, make it a bit faster but the flashing can be a bit hit and miss on various motherboards. If you don't flash it then if you wish to reinable raid 5 on this card you could grab a AOC-SAS2-RAID5-​KEY which also works with this card turning it in to a LSI 9240. The card and key can be had for just over 200 USD where as a LSI 9240 is around 300USD usually.

So in essence;
May work with your MB but need a PCI video card to free up the PCIe slot.
Can try another board with two PCIe slots but may hit the same compatibility issues again.
Can change the SAS card for a newer M1015 with is PCIe v2.0.

Note also that the SAS cards mentioned here are for only 8 drives (without expanders) so two of the new drives you have ordered will need to be connected via another means.

RB