Advice needed for new SAS HBA

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coran007

Limp Gawd
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So I received my chasis (SE3016) the other day along with an Adaptec 5085. I have 10x WD RE4-GP 2TB drives and 6x 300GB SAS 15k drives. The WD's are refurbs and wanted to test them thoroughly before putting them to use. My thought process was that I would use my LSI SAS3801E card to see all the drives individually and run BADBlocks (after some advice on the forums) or Hard Disk Sentinel in windows to find any bad drives that might need to be replaced by Newegg before the 30 days are up.

To my unpleasant surprise the LSI card is dead for lack of a better word. It's not recognized in windows on multiple computers. It lights up and all but nothing under device manager. I've since went ahead and threw the WD's into JBOD on the 5085 and they are 20 hours into testing with HD Sentinel.

Should I replace the LSI with a different HBA or just use the 5085 in JBOD? Whats the benefit of one over the other? What is a good (relatively inexpensive) replacement for the LSI card should I need to go that route?

This new setup is to be a temporary backup to my existing two Raid 5 4 drive configurations in my main computer that I can tear that down and rebuild as a 8 drive array. Once that is done I'll move the data back to the main computer and can repurpose the SE3016 for lab use and playing around with zfs/refs. As always all suggestions and opinions are welcome.
 
What would the difference be between those cards and using the Adaptec 5085 in JBOD? Curious more than anything as with my limited experience I'll defer to others, like yourself, recommendations.
 
coran007 said:
What would the difference be between those cards and using the Adaptec 5085 in JBOD? Curious more than anything as with my limited experience I'll defer to others, like yourself, recommendations.
Click to expand...

I have experienced better performance and reliability with LSI SAS over Adaptec SATA cards in linux. Although I do not have an Adaptec 5085.
 
If you want to play with ReFS/ZFS, you may want to evaluate BSD, Linux, Solaris or Windows with a raidless HBA to buld a software raid.

Believe me, you do not have that many choices.
I would use a LSI 9207-8i (raidless IT mode per default) or a LSI 9211 (reflash it to IT mode).
Avoid hardware raid adapters like the Adaptec especially with ZFS.
 
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