thank you - that’s about what I gathered but wasn’t sure.
I like the idea of getting SAS 3 and I don’t need that many ports/drives at the moment. So I’m thinking about using that 8 series Adaptec device. 4 ports should handle my needs for quite some time since I’m going to stick with SATA drives for the time being. might do an add on PCIE NVME card one day. Putting SATA SSD’s on board ports.
glad to see there are some options.
There’s really no need for SAS3 unless you’re using SAS3 SSDs.
piecing it out I have come to the same conclusion. Hell I can’t even talk myself into more than 4 drives either. At least not now
If I want either a SAS2008 or SAS2308 controller-based card, won’t going with Dell/IBM/HP be cheaper than going with either LSI or this Adaptec? Is there even a reason to go SAS2308 if I’ll only use WD White drives in this HBA card?
Forgive my noobness, I’m new to all this and I’m trying to upgrade my home server to support more drives. My current case is a Node 202 but I “might” go to a Node 804 to support an mATX mobo, not sure yet. For the non-Adaptec HBA cards, would I need a fan over the heatsink if I use desktop cases?
I think you want to avoid OEM cards because they can be dicey getting them to passthrough mode. With LSI/Adaptec you can find cards that can run in IT mode. I do know for a fact that HP branded drives do not work with Dell branded or the Adaptec 7805 card. Those drives simply aren’t seen by the SAS adapter.
The Dell branded SAS drives I have work on both so at least for me, the Dell drives were a good buy at about $7/each for 600Gb 10k 2.5" drives. I am still building my knowledge on this so YMMV.
I went ahead and bought the Dell H310 for $25 on eBay. I’m sure it’s fairly easy to get them flashed to passthrough mode. I use 5400RPM WD “white” drives so I don’t think I’ll have issues at all. My use case is for a home lab so I’m not really going to use any enterprise-grade drives.
Why, though?
I recently picked up an ASR-71605 card because I needed more drive connections. While cleaning the heat sink to repaste it I noticed 2 threaded holes that that weren’t being used to hold it down. I checked the hole spacing against a Noctura 40mm fan and they line up if the fan is twisted a little out of square. Stuck the fan on with 2 M3 x 30mm screws and no cooling problems. Simple cooling fix.
Later this evening I’ll shut it down and pull the card to take some pictures. So far the card seems considerably faster than the Dell 310 it replaced.
Can you share some pics with us please?
I recently installed a second one of these cards in a different server. It had the tapped screw holes as well, so it seems it is a standard feature on the heatsinks.
I used a converter to calculate what 200 fpm is in cfm. Using the measurements of the edge of the heatsink for duct size, it comes out to a little over 1 cfm, so pretty much any 40mm fan will provide sufficient air flow to cool the card.
I’ve got my 71605 installed in my new “migrated” build. Moved over the boot flash and all the disks from my 10 yo N40L to a new MB (MSI MAG Z590 Torpedo) in a new case (Define 7). All the disks shows up in unRAID 6.10.0-rc4 and is working fine. But they refuse to spin down for some reason…
Was thinking that I should try to boot into the Adaptec BIOS, problem is I can’t figure out how… 
Read somewhere that I should press ctrl+c during startup to enter BIOS but that didn’t work. Anyone have any suggestions for a noob?
The card came with the DRAM cache daughterboard which I removed before install. I also repasted the heatsink and installed a 40x10 Noctua fan on it.
I would also appreciate if someone can tell me how to see the cards temperature in unRAID?
EDIT: After digging deeper in the “regular” BIOS I found the Adaptec BIOS settings there under Settings\Advanced\PMC maxView Storage Manager
The second question stands though, is it possible to see the card temperature in unRAID?
Are they SAS drives?
No, it’s not possible to see card temperature in Unraid, just like it’s not possible to see LSI card temps.
Nope, SATA. Various make/models/years. Turned out the Adaptec card was set to RAID so I switched it to HBA and after that I got “Unmountable: Unsupported partition layout” for 3 of my disks. Trying to repair the filesystems now. After that’s done I’ll see if there’s any change in the sleep behavior.
Well, I just took a big dump in my unRAID server… 
I stupidly enough assumed (yeah yeah, assumption is the mother of all f…) that the drives wouldn’t be visible in unRAID if the card wasn’t in HBA mode. I was wrong!
Turned out it was in RAID mode and it worked fine a couple of days. Then I discovered it and now trying to get it back I made some errors (don’t use unRAIDs “check file system”, it corrupts it even further) and now my best bet in getting these drives back is to use some kind of recovery software.
Backup of course, but it’ll take ages to find out what is missing and what I have backup of…
TL:DR Check that your card is set to HBA mode BEFORE you start using it with any drives!
Didn’t have parity running? (ah 3 drives).
Yeah 3 drives, or only 2 in the array (only one parity drive). The 3:d was a cache drive.
Well then better luck next time…
I believe I have an overheat alarm go off without a fan wall (in the middle of testing after debugging a failed drive after a motherboard swap lol). It’s loud, my apartment neighbors could probably slightly hear it.
Going to get some fans in there, though I wish I had longer cables. Going to order those next.
Or put a 40mm onto the heatsink and plug it into mobo fan header
