ZFS and SAS drives on server

HarryStottle

HarryStottle

So here's a newbie setting up a home server to play with in a (very) low-budget retirement in the Canadian winter.;)

Stumbled across Linux as an electrician in 1994 (Slackware) and then after 2002 used Arch and then Void linux for about 20 years integrating/programming industrial robots, so zero real IT experience, just a realization that I need to move on past Linux.

My old work Dell Precision 7510 runs GhostBSD like a flawless thing of beauty.

Bought an antique ($50) ASUS Z8PE-D12 with 2x Xeon and 48GB ram and installed FreeBSD-14.3-Release.
All my spare SATA SSDs and HDDs are in it, and by using simple NFS and SMB hope to share movies and music on the home LAN.
The current disks are a mixed bag of SATA SSD and HDD.
Boot is SSD and all filesystems are ZFS.
MOBO has 6 SATA and 8 SAS ports.

Just bought a dozen Seagate SAS HDDs off kijiji, all matching and 1TB capacity.

Thought I could just buy SAS cables and plug 8 of them in, but no such luck.
MOBO manual says I have to install a RAID card to get the onboard MOBO SAS ports to even work.

So far my research tells me that I want to keep using ZFS and hence I need to avoid RAID. Is this the right way of thinking?

How about buying PCIe cards with SAS ports, to use as a host bus adapter?

Like a (Broadcom?) LSI SAS 9207-8i Card https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12353331 with IT firmware, no RAID functionality, and 8 SAS ports?

Hoping to not burn my fingers here.

All advice/comments welcome.
 
Yes, ASUS has a bunch of mainboards that require an (overpriced) add-in card to use the on-board SAS/SATA ports.
Best way to go: ignore those onboard connectors and just buy a regular SAS-HBA (LSI 9300s are dirt cheap and still perfectly fine for your use-case; 9200 are ancient, I wouldn't bother buying such an antiquity nowadays) and take it as a lesson to avoid ASUS in the future.
Also: don't use single/fanout cables, those are nothing but a connection failure and data corrption waiting to happen. Use a backplane which connects via SFF connectors and is decently powered via dedicated connectors from a server-grade PSU. The amount of drives you want to use with that system will cause problems for normal desktop/gaming PSUs.
 
That LSI card will do the trick, but make sure you can all the required cables. The 9200 will have increased power consumption, though. As sko says, better get a 9300 variant.

You should run the controller in JBOD mode, leaving the "raiding" to ZFS. Just as you say.
 
I bought this one for short:
"LSI 9300-16i SATA SAS HBA Controller 12Gb PCIe x8 Avago IT-Mode Host Bus Adapter"

I can confirm, the card works fine out of the box, no need to configure something.
And the cable, important as wrote sko.
They will probably cost you more than the board..
 
Thank you very much to all for the advice!
Did not know that they come with 16 ports.
Will do an analysis of power consumption.
Server has 650W PSU and I have a 850W PSU kicking about somewhere.

Should I keep the boot filesystem on SATA plugged into MOBO sata ports or move it to SAS?
 
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