I have purchased few HBA cards (LSI 9201-16e), to start expanding (I have 3 rigs with ~30hdds and 3-4 free PCIE slots).
At first my PC did not recognize the card, seller assures it has the latest firmware (I’m not tech savvy enough to upgrade firmware myself on HBA cards using sas2flash utility, DOs and so on) - so I figured the issue might have to do something with wrong setting and PCIE lanes detection in BIOS, I adjusted some stuff and the card finally popped up in my Device Manager.
But now it does not recognize any HDDs connected through it
Basically, I am out of clues and here I am.
IT mode would be preferable, but if you’re overwhelmed by flashing IT firmware you have to setup a RAID for every single disk in controller bios at startup of your pc.
Yes, of course
I have even tested with an internal PSU.
And yes, they are already in IT Mode, making a raid with existing plotted harddrives on my MB?
I have 9 on my MB + I wanted to connect 15-20 more hdds somehow, but now I am stuck
Any other easier solutions besides HBAs and noisy JBODs? I leave in an apartment…
Yeah, 4 ports x 4 drives, can get 16 via 1 HBA (if it ever starts working, which does not seem like the case )
I desperately need expanding, did not figure out I could replace fans in JBOD. Although it is not very popular here in the Eastern Europe - I need to start figuring out something asap
Just about 50 tb of free space left, and a lot is sitting on the shelf at home.
Obviously a bit waste of those HBA cards, as those are actually one of the best ways to hook up a lot of harddrives. But you also have 8-12 port stata expansion cards on ebay, aliexpress or other places that can connect a bunch of hdd’s.
Some open air hdd brackets are also a good option instead of Jbods. I’m still not too convinced that farming Chia actually requires active hdd cooling as long as you have good natural ventilation.
In any case slapping a few fans on somewhere is usually easy anyway
I’ve got 45 slots on one port right now. If it doesn’t perform once it’s full, I can rewire the front and back back planes separately for 24 and 21 on two ports. But also possible to chain another JBOD on this one and run even more disks. Chia doesn’t use too much of that 6Gib/s bandwidth
You can also look at expander cards to get more internal 8087 ports, those can also fan out to 4 drives each.
Is that a windows thing? I’m Ubuntu all the way through. I did format the drives in a Sabrent 4 slot toaster looking thing before putting them in caddies. I’ve heard that formatting disks while in the JBOD some times has issues, and I haven’t had reason to try it yet.
I have 3 rigs actually
Just looking for cheap and efficient ways to expand (on Win10).
Was looking at JBODs, but again, I leave in an apartment and not a rich whale by any means.
So, my plan was to add 2 HBAs to each rig, each card can hold at least 16 hdds, people say there are some slot expanders so you can connect even more…
But even that would do, but so far I can’t make them work
It’s more like 4x 6Gbits/s per 8087/8088 sas port, which sums up to 24 Gbit/s or 3 GByte/s.
This single sas connector should be sufficient for a lot of drives if you only run chia with it!
Mots HBAs have also a max drive limit, my LSI 9207 4i4e says in the manual “Supports up to 256 SATA or SAS end devices”, so I assume 128 drives per SAS (one internal SFF-8087 and one external SFF-8088) connector.
Why not switching to ubuntu linux in favor of windows?
