Hardware suggestions?

[thepregnantgod]

I'm looking for at a minimum a 24-port card that will allow me to connect 6 SFF8087 cables.  

 

My challenge, it seems, is PCI lanes despite having an X99 mobo.  When I disconnect one of my two RAID cards my Samsung 950pro operates at peak.  If both are plugged in, I find it drops to a mere 60mb read/write (slower than my storage drives).

 

Thus, I'm interesting in combining my 8 and 16 port cards into one single card.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You're looking for an SAS Expander card then.     Not two RAID/HBA cards. 

 

For instance: the Intel RES2SV240.

 

Connect one port to your SAS card of choice, and then you can hook up 5 additional cables to that.  meaning you can get 20 drives with the single card.  Get two cards, and you can hook up 40 drives with a single "8 port" SAS controller card. 

 

This is exactly what I was doing with my IBM ServeRAID M1015 and an Intel RES2SV240.   Though I only had one expander, so I could only hook up 24 drives. 

 

ALso, don't let the card fool you, you can plug it into MOLEX power and mount it anywhere, or you can plug it into a PCI-e port (4x or higher) for power (it doesn't need data). 

 

 

As for t he X99 motherboard, That sounds "normal", as in some boards reduce the number of lanes as you plug in more cards. as in 16x, 8x/8x or 8x/4x/4x for 1, 2 or three cards, respectively.  And since the SAS card doesn't use any PCI-e lanes ... just the power when it's plugged in that way... It won't reduce the number of available lanes.

 

 

(actually, if you're interested in the card, it's been sitting, collecting dust due to the move to my SuperMicro case which has a SAS Expander built in).