Thanks for the video. I always search for motherboards with lots of sata connections and this would solve that problem and I love the cable connectors. Much cleaner.
Stupid request. Can you show how to install this and attach hard drives step by step? I just 'installed' it and I don't see anything in the BIOS, or Control Panel, or Device managers? What am I missing? HELP! New to this stuff.
Did you install the card on a pcie slot at least x8? Did you install the driver? To connect you hard drives without backplane you will have to use a 4x sata to SFF 8087 cable where the SFF 8087 connector is the one on your card. If you have a backplane you most commonly have an SFF 8087 going out of it or all the sata interfaces. Just connect them and you will see something
For a second I could have sworn you took that picture of your server from my phone lol. I'm running unraid in a fractal define r5 case with the same cooler and a one generation older motherboard haha
Thanks for the comment. I do not recall the exact temperature but it dropped by approx 20-25C. I will check next time I take the cover off as it is still running today. Thanks for watching.
This is actually a SAS controller, NOT a SATA controller. It does work fine with SATA drives (SAS is mosly backwards-compatable with SATA but at the SATA speeds, so no 12GBPS).
I use the LSI 9211-8i in IT Mode on both my Unraid servers, and have previous experience with them as well, and have never had any issue even without extra cooling. These are designed to be jammed into hot running rack servers and they rarely fail. I will say many on the market, especially on Amazon and eBay, are “pulls” out of decommissioned servers where they clean and repackage them not always disclosing they’re actually well used with lots of hours on them. Also they’re widely cloned by China with LSI and/or Avago shamelessly silk screened on the board. Fortunately the virtually identical clones run the same firmware as the real thing and seem to perform equally as well and also be reliable. They’re also often private labeled by HP, Dell, etc but may have unique OEM firmware. In bare metal benchmark testing the 9211 typically outperforms the on board SATA controller with many motherboards. But, for Unraid, the operating system itself and/or network connection is usually the bottleneck. The 9211 is also natively (with the right firmware) ZFS and FreeNAS friendly.
I agree with will your comments. As I run a semi-conductor facility, I have been pre-programed to drive heat away. Though by design you are right, it does push the card to the maximum thermal budget and it helps me sleep at night knowing it is getting a bit more air circulation. As many things, this is a little of personal choice. Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it and enjoy hearing your viewpoints.
Mike Faucher It’s also worth noting Unraid 6.9 doesn’t support Highpoint controllers and won’t unless Highpoint develops specific drivers as they’re not natively supported in the kernel. It’s another good reason to use LSI.
Can you use a PCIe sas card Without half to do raid Reason why I ask is because I have two 8 terabytes and a one 4 terabyte and I would like to use it in my computer as a storage drive Asus maximum ix hero
Sure, this is not a RAID card and just a SATA controller and there are many other brands of controllers out there. THese just allow you attach the drives and you can configure drives how you want.
I am planning on building a home server for my family using my dad's old Dell XPS 8700 which has a 4th gen non-K i7- 4790 and 16gigs of ddr3. The motherboard only has a few SATA ports would this be a good card to slap into that computer for a small home server? I am also upgrading the PSU and other parts before it is ready for 24/7 use. Love the videos and thank you in advance.
Awesome, thanks for the feedback. This is a great card and mine is still in use 24/7. I did point this out in the video but if you use it remember that when you boot your system with this card it is 4-5 minutes for it to detect the drives and that is pretty normal for this card. Good luck!
Please explain to me is it possible with SAS controllers to connect my SAS hard disk of 16 TB on SATA Motherboard, and if it's possible to read my disk can you tell me what exactly type of controller will do do work- can you suggest some example?
Your motherboard controller will not support SAS drives only SATA. Any controller card that says it will support SAS should work. There many to choose from but I have only tried the LSI.
hello to you fine sir i got a HGST Ultrastar He10 10TB sas drive that i want to used as a hyperspin game drive on my pc will this card work in that aspect.
Hey Mike quick question I have the z370 maximus hero x and I am a data noob... I've got my hands on 7x 10TB Harddrives that I want to use in storage spaces dual parity. I have 4 drives connected on my mobo in a 2 way mirror but I'm rebuilding the pool with 7x dual parity. I got the LSI LSI00301 SAS 9207-8i for the expanded sata. Should I run my entire pool through that card or keep 4 on the mobo and the rest on the controller as I keep adding drives?
If you are creating one pool I would run off the card. You can use the motherboard connectors later to create a separate pool. That’s what I would do. Hope that helps and good luck.
Do i buy this or 9300 ? Using it for unraid with 8 drives . I have sata card with 8 ports it's working but its slow with 8 drives . What do you think ?
Have not tried the 9300 but it looks like a great card. Not obvious what the difference is as the specs are almost the same. If you are suffering performance issues I would certainly try it and send it back if it is the same.
The power for the drives is supplied directly from your power supply. The SFF-8087 connector on this card is only for data so you have to power your drives separately. Hope this helps.
@@MikeFaucher I'm thinking about the fractal design node 804... I was about to pull the trigger on a silverstone 5 bay, but $100 more do I really need hot swappable drive support for home user
@@PoetofHateSpeechI would go for the one that has the most bays which is the fractal. Hot swap is nice but is only used when replacing or adding a drive. My two cents.
@@MikeFaucher Thanks, I suppose I was wondering why not a SATA expansion PCIE card, my understanding is it is less reliable/not as robust as one of these things.
@@MikeFaucher so i would need that card and the fanout cable to sata connectors and im done? they would show up in the desktop as normal drives? im asking because all the cheaper sata pcie expansion cards seems cheap and not reliable as per the reviews i read
I have Pc like this Ryzen 5 5600 16GB Rtx 3060 Msi b550 Mortar Meshify2 980 evo 1TB (boot) 5 * 4TB Wd blue I'm trying to adding some harddrive later ,with that thing When I Install ,do I need some flash or something? Or just use disk management.
Do you still own this? I just built a new unraid server and I’m out of sata ports, 6 wasn’t enough lol. I’m concerned about heat and performance…maybe I can make do w 6 sata ports, 2 are only used in unraid (soon to be 3) and I’ll have to juggle other disks around for VMs
Hi Mike, this is great info. Thank you for the video. I noticed that you transferred about 37gb of data. Can the card detect 16tb or higher capacity 3.5HDD on Win10 setup? Thank you
Depends on the server. Comparable cards run the same power and heat. It's allot but if you are running 8 drives on it, it's pretty insignificant. I get your point though and thanks for the comment.
@@MikeFaucher what are the advantages of SAS vs. SATA? Is 10 - 15 k rpm way faster than the 7200 rpm? On paper it should be twice as fast but some people tell me it does not seem that much faster. I thought SAS would be A great solution that incorporates speed as well as high capacity for a reasonable price. Most people have to buy a SAS controller that would add heat which results in higher temperatures. To compensate for that you need to get new fans which potentially can add more overall noise. I have a dell precision with 128 gb ram and 12 cores. Right now it’s a workstation with SSDs but I want to repurpose it as a virtualization server so I want to add hdd speed and about 8tb storage at a reasonable price. What do you suggest?
To answer the first part, 10-15K is faster as long as the controller can take advantage of it. Faster RPM typically reduce access times but depending on the drive and controller combo may or may not speed up data transfer or throughput. Depending on what you are going to use the storage for, you can consider a RAID 10 configuration using 4 x 4T which are pretty affordable and has some redundancy if that is important. Virtualizing is typically done best on SSDs but the next best thing is RAID 10 as you get speed and redundancy without spending a fortune. A 8T RAID 10 would most likely be faster than a single drive of any type.
Thanks for the video. I always search for motherboards with lots of sata connections and this would solve that problem and I love the cable connectors. Much cleaner.
Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it. The setup works pretty well. I am happy with it.
Stupid request. Can you show how to install this and attach hard drives step by step? I just 'installed' it and I don't see anything in the BIOS, or Control Panel, or Device managers? What am I missing? HELP! New to this stuff.
Did you install the card on a pcie slot at least x8? Did you install the driver? To connect you hard drives without backplane you will have to use a 4x sata to SFF 8087 cable where the SFF 8087 connector is the one on your card. If you have a backplane you most commonly have an SFF 8087 going out of it or all the sata interfaces. Just connect them and you will see something
For a second I could have sworn you took that picture of your server from my phone lol. I'm running unraid in a fractal define r5 case with the same cooler and a one generation older motherboard haha
Awesome, great combo. Thanks for the feedback.
Liking the videos on UNRAID. Remember you from The Home Server Show with Dave McCabe. Enjoying the content.
Awesome. Thank you and great to hear from you.
Thanks for the recommendation. I was searching for a solution to keep my h310 crossflashed lsi controller temperatures down.
Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.
If you only run sata hard drives, you will only need a 9201-8i wich heats up less and uses less power (sas2008 vs sas2308
Good point and thanks for the feedback.
Is it possible to boot into a sas drive with those cards u mentioned in the video even if my mobo have no sas controler?@@MikeFaucher
My man great video!!!!! What are your temps like on the card after the fan install?
Thanks for the comment. I do not recall the exact temperature but it dropped by approx 20-25C. I will check next time I take the cover off as it is still running today. Thanks for watching.
I liked the fans in a slot.
Thanks, works well and keep things nice and cool. Still running after all these years.
@@MikeFaucher found a contraption by Akasa that let you combine two fans as a slot cooler, e.g. two Noctua fans
@@hcjkruse@hcjkruse Interesting; I will see if I can find it. Thanks.
@@MikeFaucher Amazon
This is actually a SAS controller, NOT a SATA controller.
It does work fine with SATA drives (SAS is mosly backwards-compatable with SATA but at the SATA speeds, so no 12GBPS).
You are right and thanks for the clarification.
I use the LSI 9211-8i in IT Mode on both my Unraid servers, and have previous experience with them as well, and have never had any issue even without extra cooling. These are designed to be jammed into hot running rack servers and they rarely fail. I will say many on the market, especially on Amazon and eBay, are “pulls” out of decommissioned servers where they clean and repackage them not always disclosing they’re actually well used with lots of hours on them. Also they’re widely cloned by China with LSI and/or Avago shamelessly silk screened on the board. Fortunately the virtually identical clones run the same firmware as the real thing and seem to perform equally as well and also be reliable. They’re also often private labeled by HP, Dell, etc but may have unique OEM firmware.
In bare metal benchmark testing the 9211 typically outperforms the on board SATA controller with many motherboards. But, for Unraid, the operating system itself and/or network connection is usually the bottleneck. The 9211 is also natively (with the right firmware) ZFS and FreeNAS friendly.
I agree with will your comments. As I run a semi-conductor facility, I have been pre-programed to drive heat away. Though by design you are right, it does push the card to the maximum thermal budget and it helps me sleep at night knowing it is getting a bit more air circulation. As many things, this is a little of personal choice. Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it and enjoy hearing your viewpoints.
Mike Faucher It’s also worth noting Unraid 6.9 doesn’t support Highpoint controllers and won’t unless Highpoint develops specific drivers as they’re not natively supported in the kernel. It’s another good reason to use LSI.
OK, it’s been three years now. How is his card cause I’m thinking about picking something up like this..
This has been holding up great. Still use it.
Can you use a PCIe sas card Without half to do raid Reason why I ask is because I have two 8 terabytes and a one 4 terabyte and I would like to use it in my computer as a storage drive Asus maximum ix hero
Sure, this is not a RAID card and just a SATA controller and there are many other brands of controllers out there. THese just allow you attach the drives and you can configure drives how you want.
Did you need to Flash this card to IT mode like you do with other cards? IE the h200. Or will this work out of the box?
Out of box. No need to flash these cards as they are just SATA controllers and not RAID controllers. Great question.
interesting in purchasing such a controller...would this be able to work with a windows 11 OS , just need more ports for SATA 3 HDD?
Absolutely. It should work fine. In some cases, you may need to install drivers but it should auto-detect it. Great question.
I am planning on building a home server for my family using my dad's old Dell XPS 8700 which has a 4th gen non-K i7- 4790 and 16gigs of ddr3. The motherboard only has a few SATA ports would this be a good card to slap into that computer for a small home server? I am also upgrading the PSU and other parts before it is ready for 24/7 use. Love the videos and thank you in advance.
Awesome, thanks for the feedback. This is a great card and mine is still in use 24/7. I did point this out in the video but if you use it remember that when you boot your system with this card it is 4-5 minutes for it to detect the drives and that is pretty normal for this card. Good luck!
Was it recognized by unraid on startup? No set up procedures or anything?
No setup. It just worked.
Which is a good PCIe card for adding extra 3.0 SATA ports for installing a Western Digital Black 7200 rpm (6 Gb/s) HDD?
This one will work great. Thanks.
Is this the 8087 cable? Minisas
Yes it is. 8087 to Sata breakout.
Please explain to me is it possible with SAS controllers to connect my SAS hard disk of 16 TB on SATA Motherboard, and if it's possible to read my disk can you tell me what exactly type of controller will do do work- can you suggest some example?
Your motherboard controller will not support SAS drives only SATA. Any controller card that says it will support SAS should work. There many to choose from but I have only tried the LSI.
Where did you get drivers for this to get it to IT mode?
This came configured in the NON RAID configuration. No drivers required.
hello to you fine sir i got a HGST Ultrastar He10 10TB sas drive that i want to used as a hyperspin game drive on my pc will this card work in that aspect.
This will support any sata drive but for one there are much cheaper options.
you said the LSI controller used to run at 150F; after installing the pci fans what temperatures are you seeing now?
Approximately 120-125F. Thanks for the question, I should have pointed that out in the video.
Hey Mike quick question I have the z370 maximus hero x and I am a data noob... I've got my hands on 7x 10TB Harddrives that I want to use in storage spaces dual parity. I have 4 drives connected on my mobo in a 2 way mirror but I'm rebuilding the pool with 7x dual parity. I got the LSI LSI00301 SAS 9207-8i for the expanded sata. Should I run my entire pool through that card or keep 4 on the mobo and the rest on the controller as I keep adding drives?
If you are creating one pool I would run off the card. You can use the motherboard connectors later to create a separate pool. That’s what I would do. Hope that helps and good luck.
Do i buy this or 9300 ?
Using it for unraid with 8 drives .
I have sata card with 8 ports it's working but its slow with 8 drives .
What do you think ?
Have not tried the 9300 but it looks like a great card. Not obvious what the difference is as the specs are almost the same. If you are suffering performance issues I would certainly try it and send it back if it is the same.
Will this card still lock into place once it's slotted in? or will the tab remain unlocked?
No tab lock as this is x8 card. Just held down by the the screw bracket.
Do yo need power what if hard drive is sas type?
The power for the drives is supplied directly from your power supply. The SFF-8087 connector on this card is only for data so you have to power your drives separately. Hope this helps.
@@MikeFaucher yes thanks i just make a research and I found a cable for that sff8087 to sas + satapower
@@kylelaker539 Awesome, good find.
hi i have sаs hdd16tb with which controller to connect it to my sata motherboard to work? help please
This controller does support SAS or SATA drives so it should work. There are also other out there as well. Hope that helps.
What case is are you using?...trying to find a case that supports more than 3 disks and doesn't cost a small fortune
This is an older Fractal Design Define XL. The new one handles up to 18 drives. Hope that helps.
@@MikeFaucher I'm thinking about the fractal design node 804...
I was about to pull the trigger on a silverstone 5 bay, but $100 more do I really need hot swappable drive support for home user
@@PoetofHateSpeechI would go for the one that has the most bays which is the fractal. Hot swap is nice but is only used when replacing or adding a drive. My two cents.
Why would someone choose a SATA expansion PCIE card over something like this?
Thanks for your input. This is a great choice if you have many hard drives for a storage server.
@@MikeFaucher Thanks, I suppose I was wondering why not a SATA expansion PCIE card, my understanding is it is less reliable/not as robust as one of these things.
@@qalih Have never tried one with this many drives.
did you span your hard drives as one volume?
UNRAID manages the drives and volumes so it appears as one. It is not a traditional configuration.
Can this be used without any unraid or software? Simply just like another sata port from the motherboard?
Yes, it sure can. Great question.
@@MikeFaucher so i would need that card and the fanout cable to sata connectors and im done? they would show up in the desktop as normal drives? im asking because all the cheaper sata pcie expansion cards seems cheap and not reliable as per the reviews i read
@@matrixmodulator Yep, that is it and yes it would show up as drives.
Hi, I am setting a home NAS. I got this card, do I need to flash it? If so, can you explain how I can do that. Thanks.
I did not have to flash my card and it worked fine. Remember it takes 7-10 mins to boot if you have every drive attached.
@@MikeFaucher I have a card that requires flashing, lsi 9207 8i, do you know how to flash
@@cloudstrife316 No but I think it is covered on their site. Have not flashed an LSI card before. Sorry I could not help.
Can it be used in a windows computer? or is it only for NAS servers?
It can used in computers as well. Thanks for the question.
I have Pc like this
Ryzen 5 5600
16GB
Rtx 3060
Msi b550 Mortar
Meshify2
980 evo 1TB (boot)
5 * 4TB Wd blue
I'm trying to adding some harddrive later ,with that thing
When I Install ,do I need some flash or something?
Or just use disk management.
No flash or anything required. It should detect it as a hard drive controller with adding drivers.
Do you still own this? I just built a new unraid server and I’m out of sata ports, 6 wasn’t enough lol. I’m concerned about heat and performance…maybe I can make do w 6 sata ports, 2 are only used in unraid (soon to be 3) and I’ll have to juggle other disks around for VMs
Yes I sure do. It runs 24/7 in my Unraid server.
where do you get that dual fan card from?
I got it from Amazon. I had a link in the description: GDSTIME Graphic Card PCI Cooler: amzn.to/3fd72x4. Thanks.
Hi Mike, this is great info. Thank you for the video. I noticed that you transferred about 37gb of data. Can the card detect 16tb or higher capacity 3.5HDD on Win10 setup?
Thank you
To the best of my knowledge it will as I do not think there is a hard limit. Thanks for the feedback.
@@MikeFaucher really appreciate your feedback
Was wondering the same thing, might give this a try with an 8x8TB array.
@@jSkaffaa this card can run 256 of those disks
I am sure it would but I have only tested it with 12T.
It uses 7 to 10watts of power and runs HOT. I think its useless because of its power uses that much.
Depends on the server. Comparable cards run the same power and heat. It's allot but if you are running 8 drives on it, it's pretty insignificant. I get your point though and thanks for the comment.
Mate, come to Australia where just 3 6TB WD reds will cost you over $1k
I picked up 20TB of second had SAS drives for $130
Why do these sas controllers get so hot?
Not sure but they certainly do.
@@MikeFaucher oh man. So all
Of them get so hot?
@@johndee759 All the ones I tried.
@@MikeFaucher what are the advantages of SAS vs. SATA? Is 10 - 15 k rpm way faster than the 7200 rpm? On paper it should be twice as fast but some people tell me it does not seem that much faster. I thought SAS would be A great solution that incorporates speed as well as high capacity for a reasonable price. Most people have to buy a SAS controller that would add heat which results in higher temperatures. To compensate for that you need to get new fans which potentially can add more overall noise. I have a dell precision with 128 gb ram and 12 cores. Right now it’s a workstation with SSDs but I want to repurpose it as a virtualization server so I want to add hdd speed and about 8tb storage at a reasonable price. What do you suggest?
To answer the first part, 10-15K is faster as long as the controller can take advantage of it. Faster RPM typically reduce access times but depending on the drive and controller combo may or may not speed up data transfer or throughput. Depending on what you are going to use the storage for, you can consider a RAID 10 configuration using 4 x 4T which are pretty affordable and has some redundancy if that is important. Virtualizing is typically done best on SSDs but the next best thing is RAID 10 as you get speed and redundancy without spending a fortune. A 8T RAID 10 would most likely be faster than a single drive of any type.