It has 3 x1 slots and an x16 slot, which will hopefully work for a SATA controller. My current motherboard is older and only support PCI Express 1.x. I'd like to be able to add 4 more drives for now.
I'm getting ready to add additional drives and my motherboard SATA ports are full. I wouldn't be using SAS expanders if I didn't want the PCIe slots for tuners and this allows me to only have one slot used for unRAID hard drive control and the rest of the slots can be used for other devices and VMs. I haven't noticed a heat problem but my case has good ventilation. Since this is for a business purpose, there are a variety of controllers that are costly for a home user which might fit the bill for a business.
With separate ports for each drive you'd be more future proof. We are seeing magnetics continue to grow in size and speed, and SSDs, which are dramatically faster, also grow in size and reduce in cost. Bob has had good luck with his and not saying it is a bad idea, but in general I would tend to favor using a motherboard + addon controllers and adding each drive directly to a real port. And the cost is not much if at all less than than separate controllers. With some of those answers I might advise differently, but I have read of some heat and reliability issues with some of the SAS expanders. 6T drives are becoming affordable and may be a direction to look if starting a new array and might reduce your drive count needs. What is the application you are targeting? How important is performance vs cost? Why the 24 drive limit? (I would think you might say you need to space for XX terabytes instead of XX drives). Im just trying to save money on the sata/sas controllers as most of our parts are recycled, id also not like to go down the rute i have with my own personal server. The enclosure will be completely custom built to fit in with our already existing server systems This was pulled from one of our old servers that are nolonger needed, the system will have both "Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 V2 processors" and max ram as it will be hosting unraid among other operating systems. I just as much in the dark about the expander as you are my friend, this is the first i heard of one and thought id bring it to the forum, the Motherboard my company have atm - GA-7PESH1. If you manage to get one with 8 SATA slots and add 2 M1015 (or other 8x SAS adapters) you also have 24 slots. I suppose you will use a server grade motherboard.
While I'm not sure how the expander is working - what do the experts here say with regard to the bandwith provided by a single PCIe x8 to connect 24 drives? Isn't it a bit of a bottle neck?Ģ.
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