Questions about buying my first SAS HBA

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Being merely “the family I.T. guy”, and not having any professional experience—or experience with server-grade hardware in general, most of my previous storage solutions involved buying desktop motherboards with a generous helping of SATA ports—and/or PCI cards that added extra SATA ports. A little while ago, there was a discussion on 2.5Admins about using a SAS HBA, which sent me down a bit of a research rabbit hole. I’m now in the same predicament I was in after researching ZFS, in that I feel like I’ve gathered a bunch of opinions and anecdotes that are conflicting, and in some cases, almost certainly outdated. I was therefore hoping that somebody here could set me straight on a few things.

ASIDE: Is it just me, or is anybody else finding that it’s getting harder to research things on the internet? Not only do Google search results seem less relevant than they used to be, but now there’s an ocean of what appears to be AI generated slop to swim through. A lot of this stuff starts off looking like it was produced by somebody who knows what they’re talking about, but once you get into it, you realise it doesn’t actually contain any useful information. This seems to be true for pages of text found through Google, as well as video tutorials and reviews found through YouTube.

Anyway, I have a modified PC case that holds 16 3.5” drives, and a modular power supply that has 16 SATA connectors. I also have/can-get-my-hands-on an unused MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk Max Wifi ATX AM4 motherboard with a Ryzen 5 5600GT processor in it.

Question 1: Can I just buy any “LSI SAS-3 i16 HBA” card, jam it in the slot where the graphics card would normally go, and expect it to work? Is it normal to have compatibility issues when using desktop motherboards and CPUs? Is there a website out there that documents known good/bad component combinations? Is this even a thing I need to worry about? Opinions seemed to be all over the place on this one. I read stories from people who claimed they had cards that worked perfectly in dozens of different desktop machines, as well as stories from people who claimed their desktop machines wouldn’t even boot with one of these cards installed.

I also read a couple of stories from people who claimed their drives wouldn’t draw power from a standard SATA connector once the drive was attached to the HBA, forcing them to switch to using a Molex-to-SATA adapter. Is this common?

Incidentally, the one piece of information I managed to discern without ambiguity, is that I need to get a NON-RAID card, or a card that can be flashed with LSI IT-Mode firmware.

Question 2: Where do people (particularly in Australia) actually go to get these things? And how do you pick one? And what should they cost? I couldn’t find them at any of the PC parts retailers I’m used to buying from. I did find them on Amazon & eBay, but the brands and sellers tended to have names that looked like a cat walked across the keyboard, and it wasn’t uncommon to see the exact same card (with the exact same specs and the exact same product photo) listed multiple times, with prices ranging from $50 to $500 (Australian).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for the lengthy post. Thanks in advance.

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I recently purchased a SAS HBA myself, a LSI 9300-8i. My system is an MSI MAG Tomahawk X870E with a Ryzen 9900X. Since I’m using the integrated GPU, I installed the HBA card into the first PCIe slot, typically where a dedicated GPU would go. It works great. I was actually surprised to see it shows up in the BIOS, and shows the HDDs attached. I have no issues using the standard SATA power connectors from the PSU.

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I bought my card off of eBay from “the Art of Server” (also has a YT channel) for $115 USD. I wanted to be sure I got a genuine card. All of the cards he sells are flashed to latest firmware and properly tested. I had to buy the SFF-8643 to SATA cables separately though. I also attached a small 40mm fan to mine to be sure it doesn’t get too hot.

As far as Google results go, yeah they’re getting worse. It’s sponsored links just trying to sell you something, or AI results learning from bad AI results.

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Cheers for that ZSig, very interesting. I wonder if a newer HBA with an older motherboard is going to work just as seamlessly? I checked out “The Art Of Server”, and surprisingly, found a YouTube video where he addresses the issue of drives not drawing power from standard SATA connectors when plugged into a HBA. Apparently it’s common with HDDs that were sold as externals, then busted out of their enclosures and repurposed as internal drives (I think the term is “shucking” or some-such).

Also found a couple of the 16i HBAs I was looking at, on his eBay page. They were going for between $500 and $600 Aussie dollarydoos … and that’s without cables … or international shipping—so, I guess that’s the going rate for the genuine article. Almost makes me tempted to give one of the cheapo counterfeits a whirl.* After all—what’s the worst that could happen?

* Obvious joke

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If you don’t need the bandwidth of a PCIe 4.0 card, the PCIe 3.0 cards are much less expensive. Another possibility that might be cheaper is an 8 port card + SAS expander. Maybe someone else can better advise on that.

For some reason, it’s often cheaper to buy an external HDD and shuck it rather than buy the same/equivalent drive by itself. I only have experience with the WD drives. Back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, the WD external drives had Green drives and sometimes Blue or Black drives inside that were no different than the retail version.

Sometime later, they start started coming with White drives and Red drives, with the Red drives being slightly different than the retail version. With these drives, they won’t operate if the 3.3v pin receives power. The solution is to tape or remove the pin responsible for 3.3v, or get an adapter. The WD 2.5 external HDDs used to use standard SATA connectors, but now the USB interface is built into the drive’s PCB.

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At the very least, I know more about what I’m looking for in a HBA now than when I started this discussion, so that’s a win in and of itself.

What you said about 3.3v pins sounds very similar to what the “Art Of Server” bloke was saying in the video. Of course, now I think about it, that doesn’t explain why a drive would draw power when plugged into the motherboard directly, and not work when attached to the HBA. Maybe there’s more to those stories than just that.

Personally, the only drives I can remember “shucking” where old externals that weren’t working correctly, and which I was trying to salvage. For whatever reason, I’ve always leant towards buying internal drives new, with warranties and so on. Probably wasted a lot of money I didn’t need to, in the grand scheme of things.

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You really didn’t.

The savings on shucked drives are really not worth the price you pay in the pain in the ass or the significantly lower reliability rate.

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I’ve found ebay about the best for HBA shopping in Australia, Tom - tho I’ll occasionally run a quick search across Amazon and facebook’s .au marketplaces, or AliExpress. I’m not necessarily after genuine boxed cards, as long as I can flash the latest available firmware onto them.

What card did you end up getting/from where?

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Check out the Supermicro HBAs (AOC-S3008L/AOC-S2308L, eBay):

  • No hacks required
  • Work on every motherboard I have, definitely the AOC-S2308L-8i.
  • IT/IR mode
  • Very cheap

I wouldn’t buy an HBA with 12GB/s if you only want to connect HDDs.

Most HBAs aren’t designed for consumer PC cases.
I therefore recommend actively cooling the controller.
Some get very hot even when idle (AOC-S2308L, 80–90°C idle!)!

If you want to connect 16 drives, a SAS expander is also an option.

  • e.g., LENOVO IBM 03X3834 (just an example; I don’t use a SAS expander!)
  • For SSDs, however, a single 16-port controller is better

I’ve been running the AOC-S2308L myself for more than 2 years with no issues (IT mode, ZFS, RAIDZ2).

Regards, Int3g3r

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My understanding is 12GB/s helps with expanders since all the drives would share the total bandwidth.

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That’s correct.
But do you need that bandwith?
6 Gb/s per port = 6x8 = 48 Gb/s total = 48/8 = 6 GB/s or 6’000 MB/s
Let’s assume a HDD max transfer rate is 200 MB/s
So to max out the 8 Port card you need around:
6000/200 = 30 Harddrives.
This is my reason not to buy 12Gb/s cards with hdds.
And if you use 1Gb/s (125MB/s) Ethernet you can’t saturate even one HDD.

I would only use the 12 Gb/s cards with SSDs.

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That’s not where the HBA bottlenecks. It can bottleneck on the controller itself, but more frequently the first bottleneck (and always the ultimate bottleneck) is how many PCIe lanes the card can make use of on the back end.

SAS vs SATA isn’t about the aggregate bandwidth of all connected drives, it’s about the bandwidth of each individually connected drive.

Expanders multiplex a single SATA or SAS channel to connect it to multiple drives… But with only the bandwidth of the single channel used. So an eight bay SAS expander offers 12Gbps total for all eight drives connected via that expander, while a SATA expander would only be able to offer 6Gbps total for all eight drives connected to it.

In practice, you rarely see SAS drives anymore–it’s pretty much all either SATA or NVMe. But the SAS protocol remains important even when using SATA drives, if you’re using expanders, for all the reasons noted above.

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Okay, thanks for clarifying that.

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