LSI/Broadcom 9300 vs 9400 vs 9500

Offtopic Chat
1

I have a fileserver running TrueNAS scale which currently hosts my files. It is an old desktop motherboard (4th gen i3) using a mix of the onboard SATA ports and a single onboard NVMe (for boot).

I am contemplating to expand this server with an HBA. I can see that LSI-9300 boards have been recommended for some time.

Looking for 9300-i8 boards on the European Amazon sites (.de) it seems that I can get the 9300-8i for around Euro 117+, the 9400-i8 for Euro 230+ and 9500-i8 for Euro 115+.

Both the 9400 and 9500 are TriMode SAS/SATA/NVMe.

Two questions:

  1. Price change from 9300 to 9400 seems fine - we are going from SAS/SATA to SAS/SATA/NVMe - a 9500-8i for half the price of a 9400-8i and just around the same price as a 9300 - is it fake (it is sold by Amazon US)?
  2. Is the doubled price from 9300 to 9400 worth it? I know that it will have its wings clipped by the old CPU/PCIe generation, but I am planning to change the MoBo/CPU underneath it to something like an 8th or 9th gen I3 or i5
2

A 9300 is good for around 2GiB/sec, minimum. If you think you’ll need more throughput than that, and you have enough of the right kind of drives in the right topology to potentially produce more throughput than that, then considering something newer makes sense–although I don’t know if newer models actually support more throughput or not, off the top of my head.

Once you’re chasing that kind of throughput, you start getting bottlenecked by PCIe lanes, so keep an eye on that. No controller can handle more throughput than the PCIe lanes that feed it can, and you can look up the maximum throughput offered per PCIe lane for the PCIe version that your controller and mobo and CPU all support.