# Searching a good HBA Card.



## Armitage (May 4, 2016)

Hey,

first time in my life that I will need a HBA card.
I have never touched something like this....
So, I was hoping for getting good recommendations.
I made a extensive Google search and the Infos i found the most was kind of "LSI is very bad".
And because Supermicro is using LSI on board that cant be very good..
I found one test (somewhere) and the LSI was looking very bad.


I look for a card with up to 8 SAS Ports and very good performance.
Used on a Supermicro board with Dual Xeon, FreeBsd and ZFS.

Thank you for your time.


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## phoenix (May 6, 2016)

Avago (used to be LSI) 9211-8i

8x 6 Gbps SAS/SATA channels using multi-link ports (SFF-8087 connectors).  Can use either breakout (direct attach) cables to plug directly into harddrives, or multi-lane cables to plug into hot-swap backplanes.

These are our go-to cards for ZFS-based storage servers and Linux servers.  Fully supported by the mps(4) driver.

They're around the $ 150 US mark, depending on where you get them.


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## Phishfry (May 10, 2016)

The LSI 9211-8i is 6Gb/s right?
They are true workhorses.


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## phoenix (May 10, 2016)

Phishfry said:


> The LSI 9211-8i is 6Gb/s right?
> They are true workhorses.



Ah, yeah, you're right.  Post updated.


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## Phishfry (May 10, 2016)

I have flashed some of the IBM M1015 cards to LSI MPT firmware. They are versatile and cheap.
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-m1015-part-1-started-lsi-92208i/


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## Phishfry (May 10, 2016)

The higher end cards use a battery backup module for cache. These batteries don't last forever and are very expensive.


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## sko (May 18, 2016)

Just do a search for "LSI 9211-8i" - there are lots of HBAs with this chipset on the market, sometimes re-branded by OEMs but most of them are just off-the-shelf LSI cards, maybe with an additional sticker. 
The only ones i'd avoid are the cards offered from China as they are too cheap to be "real". Original LSI 9211-8i are available for ~100-150$, the china/hong kong ones are usually <100$ for new cards and therefore cheaper than used "real" LSI cards...


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## sko (May 19, 2016)

If you need internal SATA-connectors instead of SFF-8087 you might also have a look at the ASUS P9D series mainboards and the PIKE 2008 addon-cards. The PIKE 2008 is basically a LSI SAS2008 HBA. The board runs everything from small Celerons to the biggest Haswell 4-Core Xeons and the PIKE Card doesn't occupy any of the PCI/PCIe slots. All SATA-Connectors are on the Mainboard, so cabling can be made quite clean (well, as clean as 14 SATA cables can be...). Board + PIKE Card are ~250 EUR, so it's really cost-efficient and you can spend more on RAM and/or CPU.
I've built my home-storageserver with this combination and a small Celeron CPU. It's easily quiet enough for the rack in the living room and <500 EUR for Board + HBA + CPU + 32GB ECC RAM...
I didn't run any "real" benchmarks on the PIKE HBA, but the performance of the ZFS pool (3x2 mirrors + 2x 60GB SSD for SLOG and L2ARC) is good enough to keep both 4GB FibreChannel links to my desktop system saturated...


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