Solved Raid controler for PowerEdge R610

Hi,

I have 2 Poweredge R610 with all the disk currently set as raid0 in order to be able to use ZFS.
I am aware that this is not good practice and are looking for some advise on a raid controller replacement that could be use as jbod.
I search the web and it seems that LSI is a best one out there but I just cannot figure out which is the one I need for my server.
Also, does the LSI I buy as to be IT mode?

Thank you in advance
 
Also, does the LSI I buy as to be IT mode?
They have various models, with or without built-in RAID. I have a few LSI based HBA cards (non-RAID). They tend to be a bit cheaper than their RAID-enabled counterparts. So if you're in the market to buy a new card pick one without RAID.
 
Make a backup first. Then try to set the disk to non-Raid or JBOD.

Edit: For the H200, if you want to run it in JBOD/IT mode, you will have to flash the firmware on the card .
 
I'd buy a HBA card, not a RAID card that's been made non-RAID. I have a LSI SAS9207-8i for example. But it's a fairly old model, 6Gbps. Newer cards can do up to 12Gbps.
 
Does it matter with or without a battery?
Only if you use the write cache on the card. The battery is there to prevent dataloss in case the power cuts out and the cached data hasn't been written to disk yet.
 
First question: What is the disk adapter you currently have in your Dell R610? Can you switch that thing to HBA or IT mode (where it doesn't do RAID), and simply continue using it? That would be the easiest and cheapest.

You want an HBA, meaning a SCSI adapter, without RAID functionality. That means: without battery. Go to LSI (now known as Broadcom, formerly Arago) website, and look for cards that don't advertise any RAID. If it has a battery, it will either do RAID or have a write cache; when using ZFS, you want neither. The money spent on battery and RAID functionality will just be wasted, and RAID cards are much harder to manage.

If you are building a mid-range server, you don't need the top-of-the-line models that can do 12Gbit SAS and PCIe Gen3; performance wise the 6gig models will be sufficient for a small number of spinning disks (10 or 20). On the other hand, if you want to squeeze all of the performance out of SSDs, then you might need 12gig, depending on your SSDs.

They have about a dozen models; if you add the ones that are re-sold and re-branded by other vendors (HP, Dell, IBM, ...), that becomes several dozen models.
 
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