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!
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.
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.
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?
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.