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How many hdds an evga 1600w t2 can support?


billis777

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It comes with cables that connect up to 14 hdds, can i connect more with splitters?

What is the safest amount of hdds per 6 pin sata psu port?

Also what cables you recommend getting to give me access to more hdds?

Evga has only 6 pin to 4 sata ports cables(times 3) and scaring people from using different brands.

To connect more than 14 hdds i will need to use 6 pin to 5 sata ports cables or more.

Can you guys recommend me some good cables for my psu so it can support the most hdds it can?

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5 hours ago, billis777 said:

Sounds great, i just installed the lsi 9305-24i card by the way and i cant see the temperature of it in Speccy, what program you recommend using to monitor temperatures?

Ummm… Not at home to try things atm &, tbh, I'm used to LSI RAID cards where they have a Windows GUI for setting stuff up & monitoring & whatnot - which your HBA doesn't appear to use according to the relevant download page on the Broadcom site.

If I had to make an educated guess though, I would imagine that HWMonitor - https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html - is the most likely thing to give the temp of the IOC; assuming that it actually has a sensor .

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I got an IR thermometer gun since even the hw monitor doesnt display temps.

By the way i moved my pc to an open frame case and my 8tb archive seagates sound like loud pc case fans at idle, is that normal?

Here's a recorded video if you want to take a look.

 

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After doing some googling it looks my lsi 24i hba card might be making my hard drives run at full speed all the time and making them sound like loud fans.

I have couple external seagate hard drives that use the same 8tb archive drive and are completely silent.

Is there a way to tell the hba card not to run my hdds at full speed all the time?

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Yeah, I was about to post that I'd just tried HWMonitor today & it doesn't pick up my RAID card.

Otherwise I have honestly no idea whether that's normal for the Seagate Archive drives as I use WD (plus there's a handful of ancient Samsungs that are refusing to die), though they are reported to be noisy... ...or are you using Stablebit Scanner as well?

As I don't use LSI HBA cards, what I'd suggest is to have a look on https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9305-24i#downloads - with a view to updating the f/w & drivers, as well as seeing if the Management s/w & tools has any options... Though for some unknown reason it's only showing downloads for your card in under Archive, not Current.

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I'm at work right now, do you think if i go to windows 10 power settings and choose for hdds to turn off after 10 minutes of inactivity that would work or the hba card will override those settings and keep them spinning?

I remember prior to using the lsi card those seagate hdds used to always go to sleep before and had to wait a while for them to wake up, does the lsi hba card overrides windows power settings for hdds?

If yes will an lsi software give me the ability to put hdds to sleep?

Will try the link you posted when i get home, thanks a lot!

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I just bought this card for $400 on ebay used.(seller says it was slighted used in a server for 3 months).

HighPoint Rocket 750 40-Channel SATA 6Gbps PCI-Express 2.0 x 8 HBA 750

Plan to send back the lsi as dont feel comfortable editing the registry.

Did i made the right choice pocket demon?

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Well, you're losing the ability to ever use SAS drives - though, whilst the 750 is a slower card with a lower total throughput, your current usage (given that you're using the Seagate archive drives & DP) is unlikely to ever make that a limiting issue.

Then, imho, editing the registry is really no big deal - whether it's sorting out something stupid like altering the default search engine to make it region specific or trying to troubleshoot an issue with Windows or something like this...

...so it really depends on what the LSI card cost you (assuming you'll never use SAS otherwise you'll have to buy another card) - as if it was cheaper then I'd stick with what you've got &, if needed, edit the registry.

 

Otherwise, within a price bracket, it's all about finding the best balance for your usage - so, for me -

- losing the ability to spin down active drives on a LSI RAID card (as I don't want to flash it to IT mode - turning it into a HBA - where I could then use the registry edit) isn't important; as that machine's not on 24/7, only for specific tasks, & it removes the relatively small risk of drives not spinning up fast enough & dropping out.

- whilst having a cache, BBU & the ability to use SAS drives are important for elements of what I use the machine for.

But that's just prioritising what's important to me - not what anyone else should do.

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Based on my usage the highpoint 750 card is best for me but will miss the lsi card as i was getting constant 400mb write speed, while using motherboard's sata ports i was getting 200mb write speed max then would drop down to 80mb for most of the time.(and i suspect the 750 card to have speeds similar to my motherboard if not worse.)

By the way the official write speed of the seagate archive 8tb is 188mb/s so i'm surprised how i was getting 400mb/s with the lsi card, maybe cause it was making them spin insanely fast that's why they were sounding like jet engines.

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Chris is no fan of Highpoint. You can search for Highpoint on this forum and find some of his posts on this. But perhaps the 750 is different.

The LSI card won't increase the performance of the Archive (or any other) HDD. Perhaps you were benefiting from the cache for a bit or maybe it was writing to more than one HDD at the same time or somesuch. How did you measure this?

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7 hours ago, Umfriend said:

Chris is no fan of Highpoint. You can search for Highpoint on this forum and find some of his posts on this. But perhaps the 750 is different.

The LSI card won't increase the performance of the Archive (or any other) HDD. Perhaps you were benefiting from the cache for a bit or maybe it was writing to more than one HDD at the same time or somesuch. How did you measure this?

My recollection is that Chris' issue with Highpoint was with SAS/SATA HBA cards with 'RocketRAID' (aka 'RAID on a Highpoint Rocket card') - which I believe also had driver compatibility issues with FreeNAS & whatnot... ...whereas the 750 simply doesn't use that which makes things much simpler.

 

Shouldn't be an issue for the OP for the reason above, but I guess some of it may be about how much time you're prepared to spend searching for & trialling different drivers vs having something that'll just work...

So, whilst he also doesn't recommend SIL controllers, adding a simple 4-bay DAS to my low spec 24/7 machine simply wouldn't work properly using either the onboard ASMedia eSATA (explicitly having PortMultiplier) or the ASMedia & Intel USB controllers; with the drives spasmodically dropping out several times a day irrespective of the driver version - which then obviously caused issues with DP...

...whereas a cheap StarTech SIL PCI-E eSATA controller &, whilst the latest SIL drivers seemed to have randomly stopped port-multiplication working, going back a couple of versions & it's rock solid.

Conversely though, everyone loved the 24 port HP expanders - whereas, even after buying a HP card to flash the stupid thing to the latest f/w, I just found them painfully slow... ...so people expectations & experiences certainly vary.

 

Yeah, so obviously the 750 isn't a performance card, as mentioned, but for a DP media backup usage (vs FreeNAS) then it should be perfectly adequate for the OP's usage.

 

Otherwise, I've also no idea how the OP was getting a sustained 400MB/s write speed - & would also be interested to know about the testing method for that.

Well, there's not a cache on that LSI card - so either something's misreporting the speeds; or there's another write cache somewhere in the setup; or, as you say, it's writing to a few drives simultaneously.

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I got my new highpoint card up and running. I copied some files to an hdd and in the beginning it reported speeds at 450mb/s then it would drop down to 80mb/s and even to low 20s.

A problem i had before and still have is sometimes the speed goes down to zero and freezes there for few seconds then go high again then back down to zero and repeat.

Is this a sign of the hdd dying?

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If you are using Seagate Archive HDDs, then this may well be because you use Seagate Archive HDDs.

I have had cases where I would get high write speads for a long long time on these but that basically required the HDD to be rather empty and sequential writes. If the HDD has some data on it then this occurs indeed. Having said that, I have never seen writes to the Archives be fast, slow and then fast (as in > 40MB/s) again, so something else may be going on as well.

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Another problem it showed up just today after installing the highpoint card with custom made psu sata cables from moddiy and sff 8087 cables, an archive hdd started clicking, so far i found out the reason it does is cause its writing head keeps parking itself over and over again and have to use a software to keep writing on it to keep it awake all time so it doesnt click.

I tried that and other things to keep the hdd awake and didnt work, until i switched spots with another hdd next to it and so far it hasnt clicked again or the other hdd that took its spot.

Do you know how the clicking occurs and if it's highpoint card , cable or hdd related problem?

I bought the highpoint card used by the way, seller said he lightly used it in a server for 3 months. Do these cards give these kind of problems eventually?

 

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4 minutes ago, billis777 said:

Another problem it showed up just today after installing the highpoint card with custom made psu sata cables from moddiy and sff 8087 cables, an archive hdd started clicking, so far i found out the reason it does is cause its writing head keeps parking itself over and over again and have to use a software to keep writing on it to keep it awake all time so it doesnt click.

I tried that and other things to keep the hdd awake and didnt work, until i switched spots with another hdd next to it and so far it hasnt clicked again or the other hdd that took its spot.

Do you know how the clicking occurs and if it's highpoint card , cable or hdd related problem?

I bought the highpoint card used by the way, seller said he lightly used it in a server for 3 months. Do these cards give these kind of problems eventually?

 

I assume you looked at the spin down time in the HighPoint "Non-RAID Management Software" to see if it was coinciding with that - & also the delay before any scanning or monitoring s/w kicks in?

Simply that 'an' option might be that you had competing s/w trying to respectively take things in & out of a spun down &/or idle power mode.

 

Otherwise the most likely reason for clicking would usually be a sign of drive failure...

...cable failure would normally be seen as a drive dropping out...

…&, unless the card's overheating (which would normally be one or more drives dropping out &/or BSOD), you physically damage part of them or there's some f/w issue (why you always check for updates), they either work or they don't.

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Thanks for the advice Pocketdemon, the highpoint software has options to spin down the hdds but have left it at disable. It forces you login to a website to use it which is kinda an inconvenience . So far the hdd hasnt clicked again and after the clicking problem i went through i dont mind the hdds sound like fans anymore, the clicking was so annoying. I hope i dont get to experience it again.

The software has option to light an led and spot certain hdds, do i need special cables to make it work or it works only with backplanes?

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if you're leaving it as disabled then I honestly don't know why you didn't stick with the LSI card... Obviously your choice though.

Otherwise, I guess in theory you could split every cable & wire in LEDs (& almost certainly resistors) part way along - but I've never seen any cables that natively have them... ...so the normal usage is with a backplane & a case with the LEDs.

However, since my LSI card won't identify SATA drives with the 4U case I have, I just name & order the drives both consistently (ie both in the LSI Storage Manager & Computer Manager) & sensibly (so the drive names include a number relating to the position in the case - which also corresponds to the port number on the card).

 

[Edit]

Oh, & whilst my assumption was that you were allowing the 750 to spin the drives down - since that was the problem with the LSI card... ...it could alternatively be something competing with your "Turn off hard disk after..." settings in Windows' Power Options...

Edited by PocketDemon
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I knew that there was some discussion about DP & drives clicking going back &, having had some sleep, just had a quick search - & it was actually covered again a week & a half ago.

So, as said, something (DP) competing with (probably) your Windows' Power Options settings.

Yeah, the thread doesn't explain why it was enabled by default btw - but it's something you could look at.

 

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The clicking came back and on multiple drives after i started playing a video game. When i restarted the computer it went away again.

How can i disable the BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect ?

I think now there's something in my windows that makes the drives click. I have turned the spin down drives option in highpoint to enable and power settings on hdds in windows to 0 minutes. Still the hdds sound like fans but that noise doesnt bother me anymore, i hope i can nail down the clicking problem. So far restarting the computer fixes it temporarily.

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