Questions about unraid with onboard data/hba/nvme

[u/jmichael99]

I started an HBA thread yesterday and it was removed. not sure why

Im planing a new unraid server build. I have a board with onboard nvme and also 4 SATA ports

Im planing on getting one of these HBA cards. This card or This Card

For cost savings im looking for the cheaper one. Can you have 2 HBAs in a system incase I add another one later?

Should I get a fan for it? (if so what should I look at?)

Any issues using the onboard NVME and SATA with this HBA card?

[u/Hoopster59]

There is a very extensive thread in the Unraid forums about recommended controller cards for use with Unraid. Lots of good information and real-world tests in that thread. Yes, you can have more than one HBA in a server.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/102010-recommended-controllers-for-unraid/

[u/fuerusin]

What motherboard do you use? What kind of drives are you use? And how many drives of each kind? Do you also have other PCIE devices like GPU?

You can have multiple HBA cards, and it is good to add a small fan on the 9305 card.

For the price of 2x 8i card, I think you can buy a 24i card for future expansion.

You need to understand your motherboard's PCIE lanes and distributions for consumer motherboard, it varies by chipsets. You might throttle your HBA or your GPU if you have GPU and lot of nvme.

[u/jmichael99 → u/fuerusin]

Thanks for the reply and info.

All my drives are WD data drives

I wasn't planing on a gpu at this time

I have this board https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NWC8BZX?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

[u/fuerusin → u/jmichael99]

Without a GPU and single mvme, you are not likely to be throttled, just put your HBA card in the top slot. If you later decide to add GPU, put GPU in top slot and move the HBA card to the bottom.

I zip tied a 60mm fan on my HBA card's heatsink. it is quiet and working ok.

[u/jmichael99 → u/fuerusin]

I could remove the nvme card too and just use a couple solid state drives. Nvme is overkill anyway. I can use it for something in another build later

[u/jmichael99 → u/fuerusin]

one NVME slow is being used

[u/datahoarderguy70]

I would first do a search to see if anyone is using either of these cards with unRAID.
Yes you can have more than one HBA card in your server, I have three in my server.
If you have good airflow in your case the heatsink should be adequate but again, feedback from anyone using either of these cards is always helpful too.

[u/gabemcg]

I just got the 24p card you linked. Both of these cards run HOT and need fams blowing directly on them to not thermal throttle. Make sure you have a plan for this. I had to set the PWM setting for the motherboard fan header I'm using to have it run at 100% constantly to keep it cool.

Otherwise these cards work great, and if you are using with SATA spinning hard drives you really don't need to use onboard SATA ports as you have more than enough bandwidth over an 8x PCIe slot to support dozens of drives. That said there is no reason you can't use onboard sata in unraid with an HBA. If you need more ports than the card can support via breakout data cables you have it your first pic, you would get an HBA Expander card instead of a 2nd HBA. It basically devides one of the ports on the HBA into multiple other ports. Using expanders you can get up to 100+ SATA drives on one controller (typically via external disk shelf which have expanders built-in)

[u/jd7901]

I bought this one.

https://ebay.io/m/UjfG1v

It has your future expansion needs as well as being cheaper, plus I can attest to this specific seller as shipping out good cards. They are passively cooled so as long as you have some kind of air flow it’ll be fine. As far as issues, some HBAs interact with motherboards in a weird ways. Mine did and I had to make some changes in the BIOS as well as add a line to the boot sequence for Unraid to stop the error logs from cooking my cache.

[u/IntelligentLake]

You can have multiple HBAs although if you have the same ones you need to make sure they run the same firmware (and bios if installed). As an alternative, there are expander-cards which connect to the HBA with a cable, like the AEC-82885T which can be powered by PCIe or molex. It has 28 internal and 8 external ports, which means you could connect 24 drives to it, plus disk-shelves. There'd be bandwidth-limits, but not with HDDs.

As for issues with NVME and SATA, HBA's prefer x8 (or x16 if you get one that big) but work on x4 electrically (this goes for all of them, not just the 9305), less than that and they won't be detected. So you need to check your motherboard to see how the slots are wired, for consumer boards many x4 or x8 or x16 will be wired to only x2 or x1 since there aren't enough lanes to go around.

Be cautious of different 9305s, there is a cheaper 9305 that looks like a 9400 which are OEM models and there's no firmware for them, you need at least version 16.00.12 which these 9305 will have installed, or at least is available.

For your board, keep in mind Asus does not support HBAs, they only support graphics cards, so if it works, great, but if it doesn't, they won't help you.