HBA Card Advice

[PopeViper]

I was recently donated a server with the following specs:

Supermicro 2U Server (12x 3.5" Bays)


SAS826EL1 Chasis , expander backplane with 2x SAS connectors.

X9DRI-LN4F+ Motherboard
2x Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6ghz 8 GT/s 20m Cache Eight Core CPUs
96Gb DDR3 ECC Reg Memory
12x 3.5" Trays
SIMLP-3+ IPMI Remote Access Card
2x 920w Power Supplies


I'm wanting to add this as a secondary Plex server. The server did not come with any type of RAID card. I don't plan on using RAID in the current configuration. I was wondering if anyone could suggest a good HBA, for a JBOD configuration.

I'm thinking of either ESX, or Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[01111111]

Be very careful with this system! You will need to pick a card and check compatibility for the sas expander. The lower port on the backplane is for the HBA and the upper is a pass through for another backplane.

I can tell you a 3ware 9750-8i works with this backplane (RAID) and a perc H710 does not. Supermicro has a few LSI cards that would work fine for JBOD. 3ware probably has a few cards that work with this backplane and have a nice compatibility list to check.

This is probably your chassis part number: SC826BE16-R920LPB

 

[PopeViper]

thanks, a friend gave me a lsi9260. Based on your info, i researched, and do see i have it mis cabled.

My goal is to have individual drives, no disk groups, no RAID, as i'm utilizing other recovery options for this data, but when I go into the HBA to configure, it looks like I'm forced to build a disk group, which obviously i don't want.

i just need something that can register all the drives connected into the backplane

 

[01111111]

Usually with RAID cards like this the only way to get around the "must be in raid" is to create individual raid 0 for each drive.

Looks like that card does not have IT firmware which would operate in JBOD mode.

 

[PopeViper]

I'd rather not go down that road. Any card you're aware of that might work?

 

[01111111]

What is the part number on the backplane is it sas2-826EL1 or just sas-826EL1?

I think with that backplane it's ONLY designed to work with a RAID controller, you will either need to use single drive raid arrays or swap the backplane for a JBOD one.