i'm looking around for HBA's to use for a ZFS array, and want to be able to use at least 15 drives at some point. i currently have 5x 2TB SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 ST2000DL004 drives (purchased 6/22/2011), but i want to have plenty of room for expansion later on.
the motherboard this is going in is an old ASUS A8N-SLI socket 939 board with an Opteron 165 & 4GB RAM. i don't need external connectivity, the drives are going in the same case as the motherboard. the case is a Coolermaster CM Stacker STC-T01-UW, and i will be using some hard drive backplanes that convert 3x 5.25" bays into 5x 3.5" bays (can fit 3 of these in this case for 15x hard drives).
the HBA i've been eyeing is the LSI 9201-16i, but it's $429, and i'd like to keep costs down as much as possible, as long as it doesn't sacrifice stability & ease of use. i'm not opposed to more than one card, the motherboard has 2x PCIe x16 slots and 2x PCIe x1 slots. i will be using an old PCI video card so i can make full use of all 4 PCIe slots if need be.
most likely i will be using FreeNAS on this system, and its primary use is going to be for multimedia storage for the entire house.
the motherboard this is going in is an old ASUS A8N-SLI socket 939 board with an Opteron 165 & 4GB RAM. i don't need external connectivity, the drives are going in the same case as the motherboard. the case is a Coolermaster CM Stacker STC-T01-UW, and i will be using some hard drive backplanes that convert 3x 5.25" bays into 5x 3.5" bays (can fit 3 of these in this case for 15x hard drives).
the HBA i've been eyeing is the LSI 9201-16i, but it's $429, and i'd like to keep costs down as much as possible, as long as it doesn't sacrifice stability & ease of use. i'm not opposed to more than one card, the motherboard has 2x PCIe x16 slots and 2x PCIe x1 slots. i will be using an old PCI video card so i can make full use of all 4 PCIe slots if need be.
most likely i will be using FreeNAS on this system, and its primary use is going to be for multimedia storage for the entire house.