Benoire Posted June 29, 2015 Share #1 Posted June 29, 2015 Hi, I've come up against a very annoying issue with DSM 5.2 and my current LSI9211-8i in that when enumerating the attached drives, they do not match the actual physical installed bays (3 x Rosewill 4 in 3 hotswaps)... Not a problem when they're installed but realistically an issue should I wish to find out which drive is dead OR need to replace one as an upgrade as the drive bay in DSM will not align with the drive bay in the physical host. I'd like to give the HBA the boot and replace it with a card that will do 8 ports as SATA/SAS that will actually reflect the physical connections, i.e. onboard SATA = ports 1-4; HBA = ports 5-12. Is this possible? What cards would people recommend... I don't need a full raid card, just the ability to add SATA drives (or use the SAS connectors if I get a better enclosure). Cheers, Chris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andale Posted June 30, 2015 Share #2 Posted June 30, 2015 Today I received an LSI SAS 9207-8i for SSD caching. Worked out of the box without any problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Diverge Posted June 30, 2015 Share #3 Posted June 30, 2015 Today I received an LSI SAS 9207-8i for SSD caching. Worked out of the box without any problems. I'm not sure you're following what he's looking for. He'd like (myself as well) for port 1 on the HBA to be slot 1, port 2 to slot 2... ect. LSI cards will give the sda label to whatever drive enumerates first, regardless of the port # they are attached to on the card. So every time you reboot your system the drives slots assigned to drives change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Benoire Posted June 30, 2015 Author Share #4 Posted June 30, 2015 Indeed, this is the problem and why my LSI has to go if I want a baremetal install, which I would prefer. At the moment, the only way to actually allow the system to populate the physical ports with the DSM drive bay image is to manually assign them a SCSI ID in vSphere but that still relies on vSphere to run the storage system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Benoire Posted July 3, 2015 Author Share #5 Posted July 3, 2015 So does no one on this forums use more drives than available to the motherboard or you all just use LSI cards? There are obviously Sata 6G PCI-e cards out there with 4 ports or other JBOD/Raid SAS cards too... Anyone got any experience? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snoopy78 Posted July 15, 2015 Share #6 Posted July 15, 2015 So does no one on this forums use more drives than available to the motherboard or you all just use LSI cards? There are obviously Sata 6G PCI-e cards out there with 4 ports or other JBOD/Raid SAS cards too... Anyone got any experience? i guess most of us uses LSI cards as they: - are really good - usually fully supported by mpt2sas( now also thanks to TRANTOR the new 12G SAS HBAs using mpt3sas ) - you get good, fast and reliable support if you use a "real" LSI from them - not too expensive when u buy a "rebrand" so in my opinion i wouldn't waste money on some SATA cards and buy the real thing... One more factor to take into consideration is a feature called "staggered spinup" which will save you lots of trouble when you're using more HDDs in your system.... f.e. i'm running an Xeon X34xx with 15 HDDs (10G NIC and LSI 9201-16i) on a 350W psu my new system (Xeon E5, LSI 9300-16i + M1015 IT flash, 10G NIC) also runs on a 350W psu... bcz of staggered spinup the startup power peak doesn't really exist.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rok1 Posted July 16, 2015 Share #7 Posted July 16, 2015 Since i've confirmed that mvsas works with the Rocket/RocketRaid cards you could go for one of these: http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/series_r272x.htm Specifically the Rocket 2720. 8 Port SATA/SAS card that does not have the raid function. Relatively inexpensive, and blazing fast. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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