Yesterday my PCIe SATA card pretty sure got fried, my system threw lots of i/o errors. Maybe the i/o load was too high and over time the controller “died”. I’m using ZFS and have some nodes on it, it ran pretty well for around half a year. Now I’m resilvering with a spare controller (ASM1166), and it’s pretty slow. Now I did some research and found some SAS3 Controllers like the LSI9300-16i. I found out that they are much more capable of high i/o load. Some controllers are pretty cheaply available (30€). Can you recommend this kind of controllers? TiA
I use several of them on windows, just like HBA and it work OK, but I got some of them from aliexpress with errors, like half of the controller not working, 1 sata not working.
I’m not sure how to buy them for good quality, since Amazon sells also these Aliexpress controllers. They are cheaper than the ASM1166 PCIe Cards with bad i/o throughput. I found exactly the same LSI9300-16i Cards on Ali, Amazon, and IT-Shops, all look the same. Maybe I’ll give it a shot. I read, that I have to cool the actively since they get pretty hot. Can you confirm that?
when i discovered that lsi9300 from Ali was bad, i got money back with no problem.
Also LSI9300-i16 some times want additional power from 6pin pcie
Do I really need this? When did you noticed this? 20-30w are easily obtainable via PCIe.
ASM1166 shouldn’t be slow, people have run SSD arrays and have been able to get full bandwidth with all disks connected. IOPs should not even be a concern when using HDDs.
Is your ASM1166 getting full PCI-E bandwidth?
Also if you are still on piecestore I think resilvering will take ages regardless. I once encountered some metadata corruption and it took about a week to zpool import -fFX on a 8TB node.
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Yes, it does. As a matter of fact, the ASM1166 20 port Sata Card, seem to be defective for now. It was connected via x16, so bandwidth shouldn’t be an issue. I installed a M.2 6x Sata ASM1166 card for temporary use only, since I only have 8 Drives atm, and I’m using the other 4 ports on my mainboard. I also have a NAS with 4 HDDs, and yes, I get full speed with this M.2 ASM1166 card, but this is for moderate i/o usage and only one node. I think it depends on how the manufacturer build the PCIe card, if there are any cascading controllers like some JMB585 cards do, you’ll get a hell of a bottleneck on high i/o load. I think this is my case, where a ASM1166 only support 6 Sata ports, so there might be a high chance, each of this port got a 4 port multiplier. This is my second card of this kind, which died in about a year, that’s why I wanted a more “serious” solution.
At the risk of saying something you already may know, ASM1166 can only support up to 6 devices, so any 20 port card with one of these without a PCI-E switch or bifurcator will be using one of those SATA multipliers. Tons of these cards were sold for Chia (and I guess still are).
For a serious solution that doesn’t consume a lot of power, you probably want to get 9305-16i. Obviously the newer you go the less power they use. I also recommend Lenovo 430-16i which is a 9400-16i variant that also supports NVMe!
I have been using ASM1166 for ages, no issues from me. Super low power use.
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Some of my motherboard work without it some want it. I just given you info that it might want, but if you dont have video card in your pc then this ports are free on power supply
on my experience I seen that some ASM products just not compatible with some motherboards for example i have 10port sata card on ASM chip, and my z690 UD just ignore it at all. but small 2 port adapters 4pcs work OK there.
My first card from Aliexpress died within a year or so, with only 2 HDDs and a few nodes on them (yes I know, back then I was running it like this…), The next one was a JMB585 cascading crap card, now I had a ASM1166 one. So I think, in my NAS use-case these things are pretty good, but not for too much i/o. I generated too much nodes back then, I don’t want to give up (20 nodes), so I think it’s just too much, even though a HDD has not that high iops. Maybe I’ll give an Aliexpress LSI9300-16i a shot, since they are around 30 bucks.
I did some research, this can be an issue, if you only run it via x4 which provides less power. I’ll see. I keep it in mind.
dont forget you need mini sas HD 4pcs cables, with them it already around 80 bucks
Luckily I need only 2 cables at the moment, since I have 8 HDDs. Later I’ll buy the rest cheaper on Ali. Should’ve done this earlier, for backup if the case happens, like it did now.
I think it will be cheaper to by as one set with cables than get it separately.
I have one p840 with cables as backup, also bunch of 2 port cards for flexibility.
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I am using LSI 9305-24i and 9306-24i cards with no problems.
Be aware those cards are made for server cases with good ventilation. If not used in such case I would recommend to add a small fan to the heat sink.
I already thought about that. I found a file on printables, and printed a mount for a 92mm fan to clip it on the heatsink.
I added fan there with stripe. work ok
The 9300-8’s are OK as they only use a single chip: but avoid the 9300-16’s as they run very hot with their dual chips. Buy a 9305-16 (or 9400-16) instead. Basically there’s a reason 9300-16’s are cheap: nobody wanted them after the 9305-16’s came out and did the same thing using half the power.
Either way, switching to used SAS gear for attaching bulk drives is an excellent idea. It’s cheap, fast, and reliable.
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