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card madness!?

M

munkle

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Jan 16, 2005
Messages
11,799
So I've been looking at expanding my media center's storage, as I have filled all my ports on my z87 mobo I need an add in card. I'm getting really confused by all the didn't types of cards and the difference between them. I use stable bit drive pool to pool my drives so it's like one big drive, I duplicate certain folders across drives that are semi important, though honestly not a big deal if I lost anything.

I'm looking for something that does 8 sata ports and passes the drives through to the os so that drive pool can manage the drives. I'm not entirely sure if it's a card with jbod support that I'm looking for? The last raid card I had many years ago had a jbod option but the card itself pooled the drives so the os didn't know it was multiple drives but one big drive. I don't want that as drive pool wouldn't be able to manage the drives.

Some help would be greatly appreciated in finding a card that passes all 8 drives through to the os would be great.
 
What you essentially want is a host bus adapter (HBA) vs a RAID controller. These would just pass each drive directly to the OS without any JBOD/RAID being involved.

Popular ones tend to be various LSI models (9211, 9220, 9240, etc) or their re-brands (IBM M1015). Each of these can be flashed to an IT mode which makes them function as dumb HBA adapters.

Be careful of older HBA controllers as they may not support drives over 2TB (for example cards based on the LSI SAS1068E controller, etc.)
 
So looking into the lsi cards from what I can tell they don't spin down the drives and don't pass the commands when windows tells them to either. This is something I would like as drive pool only spins up the drive it needs data from. Does anyone have recommendations on cards that would spin the drives down or pass the windows commands?
 
munkle said:
So looking into the lsi cards from what I can tell they don't spin down the drives and don't pass the commands when windows tells them to either. This is something I would like as drive pool only spins up the drive it needs data from. Does anyone have recommendations on cards that would spin the drives down or pass the windows commands?
Click to expand...

They do but you need a program to pass it as a SAS to SATA command since they are SAS cards

You can use smartctl or other choices
 
munkle said:
So looking into the lsi cards from what I can tell they don't spin down the drives and don't pass the commands when windows tells them to either. This is something I would like as drive pool only spins up the drive it needs data from. Does anyone have recommendations on cards that would spin the drives down or pass the windows commands?
Click to expand...

I use a IBM M1015 flashed to a LSI9211-8i IT and modified the LSI drivers so the HDD spin down in Windows 7, works fine.

Download the latest driver from here.
http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/storagecomponents/Pages/LSISAS9211-8i.aspx

Open LSI_SAS2.INF with notepad
Find the [Shutdown_addreg] section.

Add this line.
Code:
HKR,"StorPort","EnableIdlePowerManagement",0x00010001,0x01

Re-install the new driver.
Set the delay in Windows power settings
Click to expand...
 
You didnt list the drives you have, but it might be better just to replace smaller drives with 6 TB or larger drives.
 
leeleatherwood said:
You didnt list the drives you have, but it might be better just to replace smaller drives with 6 TB or larger drives.
Click to expand...

in no way would it be better for me to replace with 6tb drives. 4tb drives are cheap, a card is about $100, way cheaper than going 6tb route.
 
munkle said:
in no way would it be better for me to replace with 6tb drives. 4tb drives are cheap, a card is about $100, way cheaper than going 6tb route.
Click to expand...

It depends on which drives you go with. Current Newegg pricing on the WD RED for example, $170 for a 4TB and $270 for a 6TB. Scale Up and that 4TB goes to $255 in equivalent size and add ~13 for a single port value in a $100 8 port card and you are right there. Similar price multiples on the Seagate STBD 4/6 as well. 6TB drives would also decrease power utilization, heat, vibration, port count, cabling etc. vs 4TB models for a given total size.
 
Last edited:
munkle said:
in no way would it be better for me to replace with 6tb drives. 4tb drives are cheap, a card is about $100, way cheaper than going 6tb route.
Click to expand...

How much storage do you need now and in the near future? You are wise to consider two drive redundancy to decrease the chance of data loss.
 
Last edited:
mwroobel said:
It depends on which drives you go with. Current Newegg pricing on the WD RED for example, $170 for a 4TB and $270 for a 6TB. Scale Up and that 4TB goes to $255 in equivalent size and add ~13 for a single port value in a $100 8 port card and you are right there. Similar price multiples on the Seagate STBD 4/6 as well. 6TB drives would also decrease power utilization, heat, vibration, port count, cabling etc. vs 4TB models for a given total size.
Click to expand...

Agreed

The cost per gigabyte with those numbers on 6TB is only ~5% higher for a 6TB Drive vs 4TB Drive. You really want to reduce the number of drives you need for a storage array.


4TB @ $170 => $42.5 per TB
5TB @ $232 => $46.4 per TB
6TB @ $270 => $45 per TB
 
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