Canyou use a RAID SATA controller in Non-RAID mode?

Happy Hopping

Happy Hopping

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Say I just want to connect 4 x SSD 6 GB/s drive, for e.g., drive h,i,j, k
w/o engaging the use of RAID. Can it be done?

Because their regular controller are all 3 Gb/s.

Unless there is another reliable brand name SATA controller that gives 6GB/s, but I always use Adaptec as they are good to me all these years
 
Say I just want to connect 4 x SSD 6 GB/s drive, for e.g., drive h,i,j, k
w/o engaging the use of RAID. Can it be done?
Click to expand...
AFAIK you can mount as many drives as you want on either a MB or an add in card and they show as seperate drives.

I don't even have the RAID driver loaded on my LSI 9240-4i and it works just fine.
 
Depends on the controller, which you didn't list. You did specify Adaptec though, but no specific type. I can't comment on Adaptec RAID adapters though; no experience with them.

Generally if it is FakeRAID it acts as normal SATA controller under anything outside windows. If it's hardware RAID then you cannot use it as HBA (non-RAID) but you could alternatively create an array for each disk. The disks may need TLER to prevent from dropping out in such a configuration, depending on the controller.
 
To expand on what sub.mesa said, some controllers (e.g. my Highpoint 2640) will recognize and pass-through non-RAID drives, but only if they have already been partitioned on a conventional controller (e.g. your motherboard SATA ports). If you just connect a raw blank drive, the card makes you initialize it as a RAID drive before making it visible to the rest of the world.

I don't know about Adaptec specifically, but this should give you an idea of the range of behaviors possible.
 
My experience with fakeRAID controllers is that they will pass through any drive which is not part of a RAID array configured by the controller, so if you configure a RAID array from two drives on a 4-port controller, the remaining two will be seen by the OS.

This is my experience with Silicon Image and HighPoint 1540 controllers.
 
What you want is a HBA, not a RAID controller. LSI is very good in this regard.

With my 5805, I could make single drive "arrays", which would work just the same, however I don't believe you would be able to toss the drive into another controller and have it readable since it would be marked as a RAID drive.
 
Yes, a RAID controller card can mount as many HDDs/SSDs as it can physically take without RAIDing them together.
 
Old Hippie said:
AFAIK you can mount as many drives as you want on either a MB or an add in card and they show as seperate drives.

I don't even have the RAID driver loaded on my LSI 9240-4i and it works just fine.
Click to expand...

how exactly do you do that? I have 6 SATA 2.0 ports on my motherboard, it's a HP Z800 computer. 2 connects to Blu-Ray and DVD drive. The other connects 2 SATA hard drive. So how can you mount as many drive as you want?
 
Red Falcon said:
Yes, a RAID controller card can mount as many HDDs/SSDs as it can physically take without RAIDing them together.
Click to expand...

http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=pXu758gzoQt3BV9s&templete=2

I found this guy. It's about $60 ea. So say I need 4 SATA 3.0 ports, I just pay $120 total for 2 x ASUS SATA 3.0 controller, and I don't need to go thru the hassle of setting up those RAID controller.

I pick Adaptec because I trust the brand name, because we are dealing w/ SSD controller, I don't want to take any chance
 
Very nice choice, Adaptec is a good brand, so that should work great.
 
http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/hba/sas_sata_hbas/internal/lsisas92118i/index.html

Can connect to 8 SATAIII (6 Gbps) drives. It can be flashed to IT (Initiator-Target) mode, where all RAID functions are disabled. All drives show up separately to your OS. I have two of these in my file server and can only report good things about them.
I would prefer those to the ASUS cards which AFAIK contain Marvell controllers anytime.
 
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So how can you mount as many drive as you want?
Click to expand...
You're right!

Should read "As many drives as avaliable ports" for those that get confused easily. :)
 
Back when I had to use a dinky $25 card by rosewill, I simply put as many dvd and esata devices on it as possible (rather than hard drives). It allowed up to 4 ports at one time, even though it had two external esata ports and four internal sata ports. I had my two dvd drives on it and one front panel esata port on it and left one rear esata port open. All the port configuring on the card was done via on-card jumpers. It worked well, just added a few seconds to my boot time.
 
omniscence said:
http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/hba/sas_sata_hbas/internal/lsisas92118i/index.html

Can connect to 8 SATAIII (6 Gbps) drives. It can be flashed to IT (Initiator-Target) mode, where all RAID functions are disabled. All drives show up separately to your OS. I have two of these in my file server and can only report good things about them.
I would prefer those to the ASUS cards which AFAIK contain Marvell controllers anytime.
Click to expand...

how exactly do you manage to connect 8 drives from those 2 mini connectors? is it NON-RAID?
 
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With these (sff-8087 to Sata forward breakout cables):

C-SFF8087-4S_l.jpg


edit: and the IT / initiator - target mode firmware makes it just an 8 port sata controller with no raid
 
This a timely thread. I've been looking around for a card to just connect SATA drives, no raid. This seems to be what I'm looking for. Sweeeeeeeeet.

edit: Although how does "Support for up to 256 physical devices" work when it only has two ports. The SAS-to-SATA cable seems to only have four SATA connections. My math says that's eight drives. Are there additional pieces of hardware that can be used with this to get to 256 devices?
 
yes, you can use SAS expander cards. You get an sff8087 to 8087 cable and plug the two ports on the hba into the expander, and then it in turn has more sff8087 plugs to goto sas backplanes or hdd's if you use breakout cables
 
What you are looking for is an HBA, NOT a raid card (raid on chip or fakeraid). A couple of cards you might want to research:

SASUC8I

LSI SAS3081ER

Both these cards can be flashed to IT firmware which will allow them to be used as an HBA (simple, non-raid controllers).

Each card can support up to 8 SATA drives using two SFF-8087 to 4xSATA breakout (forward) cables. Or you can connect to a SAS Expander to support more than 8 drives without buying any more controller cards. Do some research on [H] and http://www.servethehome.com/ before you order stuff for your build.

EDIT: If you are working in Windows you should also be able to use a raid card (inexpensive ones like the Dell Perc 5i or IBM M1015) to present each drive as an individual drive without assigning them to a raid array. You will likely not be able to use these in systems which use Software Raid, where the raid arrays are controlled at the OS level and not the hardware level (like Win Home Server or ZFS).
 
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yeah I have two of the sasuci8's in my server flashed with the lsi 3081 IT firmware and they work great
 
Cryptic1911 said:
With these (sff-8087 to Sata forward breakout cables):

C-SFF8087-4S_l.jpg


edit: and the IT / initiator - target mode firmware makes it just an 8 port sata controller with no raid
Click to expand...


I have never seen that kind of cable before. So I'm a bit skeptical. W/ a regular SATA data cable, I know I can get 6 Gb/s. But this cable split a 4 to 1 connections, do you still get 6 Gb/s per cable? Can that little main connector handle a total of 24 Gb/s bandwidth?
 
aubsxc said:
Both these cards can be flashed to IT firmware which will allow them to be used as an HBA (simple, non-raid controllers).
Click to expand...

is this "IT firmware" from the same manufacturer? IF so, are you saying the manufacturer has a SEPARATE firmware for people to download for NON-RAID on a RAID card?
 
Happy Hopping said:
I have never seen that kind of cable before. So I'm a bit skeptical. W/ a regular SATA data cable, I know I can get 6 Gb/s. But this cable split a 4 to 1 connections, do you still get 6 Gb/s per cable? Can that little main connector handle a total of 24 Gb/s bandwidth?
Click to expand...

Nah, they are lying, just like Intel. Don't believe them!
 
Happy Hopping said:
is this "IT firmware" from the same manufacturer? IF so, are you saying the manufacturer has a SEPARATE firmware for people to download for NON-RAID on a RAID card?
Click to expand...

Both cards I referenced (Intel and LSi) are based on the LSi 1068e controller, and both can be flashed to the LSi IT firmware to remove the raid functions. Read more here.

I have never seen that kind of cable before. So I'm a bit skeptical. W/ a regular SATA data cable, I know I can get 6 Gb/s. But this cable split a 4 to 1 connections, do you still get 6 Gb/s per cable? Can that little main connector handle a total of 24 Gb/s bandwidth?
Click to expand...

Build a system and test it for yourself. Or look up some of the 5,000,000,000 benchmark reviews that you will find online if you look.
 
Happy Hopping said:
I have never seen that kind of cable before. So I'm a bit skeptical. W/ a regular SATA data cable, I know I can get 6 Gb/s. But this cable split a 4 to 1 connections, do you still get 6 Gb/s per cable? Can that little main connector handle a total of 24 Gb/s bandwidth?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. The single connector just carries all channels separately. It is just a passive cable, not some kind of magic.

aubsxc said:
Both cards I referenced (Intel and LSi) are based on the LSi 1068e controller, and both can be flashed to the LSi IT firmware to remove the raid functions. Read more here
Click to expand...

I'd like to add that the 1068e based cards like the Intel SASUC8i are NOT 6Gbps capable.
The IT firmware is offered by the manufacturer of the RAID chip and cards, LSI.
 
If you're running spinning disks, does it really matter? 6gbit = 768MB/s, and 3gbit=384MB/s.(per drive) Current drives can't transfer at those speeds anyways.. or am I missing something?
 
SATA 6Gbps = 600MB/s
SATA 3Gbps = 300MB/s

PCI-express 1.0 250MHz = 250MB/s per lane
PCI-express 2.0 500MHz = 500MB/s per lane

The reason why you should not divide by 8 is that SATA and PCIe follow the 8/10-bit encoding scheme.

If you use expanders you could have 100MB/s of throughput per drive, but even when not utilizing that amount, the latencies would have increased.

When doing IOps at 20MB/s, performance of 6Gbps SATA link will be better than 3Gbps SATA link, due to propagation delay (delay of the cable signalling; which is only half for 6Gbps SATA compared to 3Gbps SATA). The difference is not very significant though, i estimate a max 20% performance difference.
 
Cryptic1911 said:
If you're running spinning disks, does it really matter? 6gbit = 768MB/s, and 3gbit=384MB/s.(per drive) Current drives can't transfer at those speeds anyways.. or am I missing something?
Click to expand...

You're not missing anything.

Mechanical drives barely do SATAI (150Mb/s) and connecting to a SATA II or III interface will do nothing to increase speeds.
 
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