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 Post subject: Need a Controller card
PostPosted: Thu Mar 29, 2012 4:49 pm 
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Well my WHS machine is full 12 HDD's and no more room.
Have a new case to put them in as well as a few other hard drives to be added but I am having trouble finding some controller cards that are compatible with WHS.
I need 2 controller cards, 8 port each with 2 SFF-8087 connectors on each PCI-Ex4.
Any ideas??


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2012 9:24 am 
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I am currently using 3 SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8 PCI Express x4 Low Profile SAS RAID Controller which you can purchase at the link below:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816101358

I am not certain which types of cables you will require. If your going from the card and straight to each drive then you will need the following cable:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816116101

If your connecting the to a backplane then the cable below may be what your looking for depending on the backplane configuration:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816133034

I use the MV8's in a WHS2011 Server named Highlander others have used this same controller in WHS v1 servers so its proven to work with WHS. If you perform a site search using MV8 or AOC-SASLP-MV8 you should be able to find a wealth of information posted by other forum members regarding the use of this particular card. Newegg is only one supplier and there are others but of the 3 cards I purchased I did have to RMA one card and NewEgg was great to work with. I also had to deal with Norco because I had an LED Issue with one of my backplanes and once we were able to identify the backplane Norco provided me with a replacement so both companies were great to work with.

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vossy
PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:09 pm 
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vossy wrote:
I need 2 controller cards, 8 port each with 2 SFF-8087 connectors on each PCI-Ex4.
Why two controllers?

Why not just get one with 4 SFF-8087 connectors?


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vossy
PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:09 pm 
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This HardOCP thread has some excellent ideas. Not trying to divert traffic from this site, but I've watched this thread for some time now as it is all about a low cost HP SAS Expander.

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vossy
PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2012 4:16 pm 
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ymboc wrote:
vossy wrote:
I need 2 controller cards, 8 port each with 2 SFF-8087 connectors on each PCI-Ex4.
Why two controllers?

Why not just get one with 4 SFF-8087 connectors?

Because I thought it would be cheaper and trying to get away from single point failure as the older normal sata cards I have used when one fails still have the other ones. Can you give me some advice on a decent 4 port one that is not too expensive?


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PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2012 12:34 pm 
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Well I ended up getting two LSI SAS 9211-8i's but in hindsight (and if they were available at the time) I should have gotten one 4-port HBA such as the one I linked in my previous post (LSI SAS 9201-16i).

These are a pretty good investment because they're Sata3 (6GB/s) and support 3TB Drives. They're pretty new however so there are important driver & firmware updates every 2-3 months.

I don't see the benefit of having two separate controllers because if even if just one goes down (for some unknown reason) the pool still becomes unavailable (because it spans across both controllers) so you haven't avoided 'single point of failure'... in fact the overall reliability is decreased because you have two single points of failure instead of just one.

helrazr brings up a good point. In theory you should be able to buy a single-port SAS card that drives an SAS expander which then connects to all your drives. That would be the route to go if the expanders didn't cost as much (or sometimes more) than a dedicated SAS cad.... that and it introduces yet another single point of failure.

All That said I woudn't focus all that much on these 'points of failure' but rather that you have a way forward in the event of failure. All Hardware dies eventually. Just make sure that a dead controller wont result in data loss -- you can do this by sticking to software RAID (eg: linux lvm, zfs, btfrs, 'DE' or some 'DE'/JBOD substitute) and keeping your most important data backed-up offline.


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PostPosted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 7:41 am 
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Bringing this back up as I know more people will be building in the years to come.
I finally got my setup fired and found out my card does not pass SMART data.
Adaptec 1405 2256100-R SATA/SAS 4 internal ports non-RAID
So I will be looking to replace my card with something that does pass SMART data.

I need a card that does only 4 drives as I have 4 on board. I will be looking at what others have used, I can only guess they are getting Smart data from theirs.

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PostPosted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 8:01 am 
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EDIT

I corrected the links. Original post had a link to jungle disk and I apologize for the error

I am using the Supermicro MV8 which sell on Newegg for $109. There are 2 versions of this card:

This one is SATA3 and is only JBOD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816101792

This on is SATAII and supports JBOD and RAID and is the one I am running: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816101358

You would need an SFF8087 Forward Breakout cable to connect to the controller to your drives. Be careful when you order the cable because there is a reverse breakout cable and if you put them side by side they look the same but the cables are directional so I am telling you that you want the forward breakout cable to make the connection work.

If you had an SFF8087 backplane and wanted to use the motherboard SATA Ports to connect to the backplane then you would use a reverse breakout cable.

These things make my head spin because I have both types of cables here.

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Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8


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