Question Looking for SAS/SATA Pcie boards that work with Windows 11

[mandrix]

Hey all.
I recently tried a LSI SAS9300 16i board (dual 3008 controllers) in my Win 11 Pro machine/Z590 mobo and Windows HATES it apparently, and does all sorts of screwy stuff.
Conversely in my Win 10 machine it works perfectly, but that is not the target machine.

So I need a cheap board that will work in my Win 11 machine, prefer 16i but 8i if I have to. Refurb board, Ebay special, whatever.

All SATA drives, no SAS drives.

Help greatly appreciated if someone can steer me to some choices, I'm sick of Pcie SATA boards that die in a few months and want to switch to SAS.

Thanks!

 

[mandrix]

OK then, no one has a SAS board running on WIN11 or doesn't care to post.
So I ended up buying a "refurb" Adaptec 71605. I have 16 drives connected to it via breakout cables.
Price was about $69 off EvilBay.

Only problem I'm having is booting in UEFI mode the BIOS becomes confused and thinks the boot drive is corrupted, which is strange since it's an NVMe drive right on the mobo.
Going into the BIOS after the warning and then just exiting and a normal boot happens.
No problem with any of the drives in Windows, although some utils like CrystalDiskMonitor can't see the drives. I have the Megaraid Storage Manager for that.

 

[mandrix]

Talking to myself here. Anyway, problem solved.
Switched to an LSI SAS9211-8i with a Lenovo expander board.
Disabled boot on LSI card.
Booting fine into Windows now. That's the short of it anyway.

 

[Misgar]

Many thanks for these useful posts. I have SAS controller cards in a number of Windows 10 and Server 2008 R2 computers for hard disks and LTO tape drives, but was not aware of compatibilty problems in Windows 11.

When Windows 10 security updates end in 2025, I can use your experiences as a guide when updating to Windows 11. It's a shame Microsoft had to "break" perfectly serviceable old hardware in their latest OS.