Looking for 1 or multiple HBAs to use with a chassis.
Looking for 1 or multiple HBAs to use with a chassis.
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!
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.
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?
yes, is what i get reading about that server backplane. NVME part will need another "controller"
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.
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?
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.