Recommended HBA for ZFS, contemporary

[Karl Denninger]

I'm still a fan of the LSI SAS-9211 cards along with (for higher
density) a SAS port expander.  I've been extremely happy with this
combination with one caveat -- most systems must boot from the actual
card and not a port on the expander(s) you connect to it due to BIOS
constraints.  They're also crazily cost-effective on-balance.

In practice this means you have 4 ports on the base card available (2
used for mirrored boot drives, 2 for other things) and the rest of the
disks go on the expander, or you run more than one card.

Whether you can actually saturate this combination depends on what you
attach.  In large configurations, especially those stuffed with SSDs,
you can -- at which point something faster such as the 93xx series which
are materially faster (but still in "host" mode as opposed to any sort
of "smart", "raid" or "buffered" mode) should be considered.

The "smarter" the card the dumber the results tend to be when ZFS is in
use, in my experience :)

Pay attention as well to the slots on your server board and the number
of lanes they can support.  It makes no sense to buy a fast board that
your motherboard cripples because it cannot run it in the slot(s) you
have available at full speed.

On 8/22/2016 11:08, Dmitry Morozovsky wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> what is the list of preferred disk controllers to build storage server, say 
> 12-24 amd more 3.5" disks?  Not too much IOPS are expected, and some could be 
> mitigated with L2ARC with only metadata cached, I suppose.
>
> Two usage schemes are file server for big files (mostly cold storage) and 
> backup/surveillance server (constant stream writes, occasional random reads)
>
> Any hints? Thanks!
>

-- 
Karl Denninger
karl at denninger.net <mailto:karl at denninger.net>
/The Market Ticker/
/[S/MIME encrypted email preferred]/
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