this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
16 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40491 readers
698 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello, guys! As the title suggests, I am looking for an HBA. The chassis I am planning to get is an Inwin IW-RS216-07 with 8x 3.5-inch SAS/SATA bays and 2x 4x 7mm U.2 SSD bays.

I am not sure which HBA (or perhaps multiple HBAs) would be suitable to utilize the full capabilities of the backplanes. Just to clarify, I am talking about an HBA and NOT a RAID card, as I will be using the system with ZFS.

Any suggestions or directions to which HBA to get would be greatly appreciated!

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

what is wrong with old good LSA 2008 based HBAs with SAS-to-Oculink cable? and for NVMe part, adapter is just port format converter, pick any.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

wait so i can use a single HBA and use some of the ports to connect to the oculink ports of the backplane and some for the miniSAS ports of the backplane?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

yes, is what i get reading about that server backplane. NVME part will need another "controller"

[–] MorphiusFaydal 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If I understand the ports you have - Supermicro AOC-SLG3-4E4T for the U.2 bays and a Supermicro AOC-S3008L-L8e for the SAS bays. You could replace the SAS card with a Dell HBA 330 as well. The Dell PERC cards that support NVME storage don't appear to have the Oculink ports your backplane has.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Thank you! This helps a load. If i understand correctly when you use the oculink it becomes nvme only. and when using the other connector like miniSAS it will work with SATA/SAS instead?

Also I am not entirely sure how the 2 drives in the back are connected I think straight to one of the HBAs?

[–] MorphiusFaydal 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

That's right. So on the top backplane, you'll connect the Oculink ports to the Oculink outfitted HBA. One port per drive.

For the bottom 8 drives, it looks like you'll have one miniSAS HD connector per four drives, plus another for the rear bays. I initially thought they were plain SATA and would go to the motherboard. But it looks like you'll need a third connector - so you'll want a 16 port HBA (Supermicro AOC-S3216L-L16iT).

Reading through all the documentation I can, it looks like you'll have the option to run all the bays as NVME or SAS disks. The controllers and layouts I've listed are for running four bays as NVME, and the other 10 as SAS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Hey, So I have been looking for a motherboard that has multiple PCIE gen3 x16 slots. i wanted to use a amd ryzen 9000 CPU but at least for asrock server boards they only have a single PCIE gen5 x16 slot. do you know if their is a single HBA that i can use to connect everything to instead of using multiple?

[–] MorphiusFaydal 1 points 1 day ago

I'm not aware of any that would run all of it at the same time. Most of this equipment is built for use with a server CPU and motherboard, which obviously has more PCI-E lanes. The Zen 5 consumer CPUs only have 28 PCI-E lanes, so unless you buy a motherboard that breaks out more through the use of a PCI-E switch, that's all you'll get.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Awesome thanks for the great help! I find it slightly confusing with all the connector types and backplane stuff. This helps out a load. I think I will go for the layout you laidout their.