Need to add SATA ports.

[don256us]

Using an older X58 chipset MB with a XEON chip. Running unRAID server. I have exedded the number of SATA ports on the board. I'm looking at older RAID SAS cards or cheaper HBA's with like 10 ports per card or something similar. RAID card or not it will be configured as jbod.

Example HBA: https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-00VP-00002

I would like some thoughts on getting something that won't overload my PCIe v2.x slots. I have plenty of PCIe x16 but again at ver 2.x.

The most demanding use of this server is playing ripped versions of media that I own. Blu Ray movies stored at like 30 GB would be an example of the type of media I may be viewing.

 

[EarthDog]

Overload... as in, too much bandwidth?? PCIe 2.0 x16 is still 16 GB/s. I don't imagine a slew of HDDs are going to come close to that. Even the fastest HDDs are around 200-300 MB/s (alone). Since it's a JBOD, and not a striped array, you're still looking at that ~200+ MB/s. Streaming BR movies from the drive isn't an issue.

I'll leave the card up to someone who knows.

 

[Janus67]

https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/pw0y2m

Just an example post, if you do a search on there for 'expander' you should find various SAS Expander discussions and recommendations I imagine, as well as on the official unraid boards. Basically [my understanding] is that you would use your HBA with a mini-SAS to mini-SAS to the expander which will have more ports. Probably cheaper than buying an HBA that has more on it. The HBAs that I have all have 2 ports on it so if I just use a basic splitter it is 8 drives to one card, but with an expander it can go quite a bit larger.