I notice that most of the builds on serverbuilds.net use LSI HBA SAS cards with SFF-8087 to SATA breakout cables to connect all the SATA drives. Is there any reason to go for a SAS controller card over a SATA card if I’m using all SATA drives? What about just connecting the drives directly to the motherboard’s built-in SATA connectors?
Does an LSI HBA SAS card provide some kind of performance benefit? Do we gain something from using SAS in particular with SATA drives? What makes it better than a plain PCIe card with extra SATA ports?
Googling turns up some discussion about potential problems from connecting SATA drives via SAS. Are these legitimate concerns? Are SATA+SAS problems common?
Things have changed in the past decade friend. (articles from 2010).
The answer is you can use both SAS and Sata. You can use an expander to greatly increase the number of attached drives. You can add aDAS as well. They’re rock solid and stupid cheap. Makes cable management a breeze overall. Why limit yourself to just SATA
TL;DR it’s almost all positives to use a SAS controller. Just make sure to use IT mode
I did notice they were old articles, but of course a lot of the hardware used in these builds is almost a decade old too, so I didn’t know if it would still apply. I’m glad to hear it’s not a problem anymore though.
I was just reading about flashing SAS controllers into IT mode. Can I safely assume that it’s always best to us IT mode on any LSI SAS HBA, or does it depend on the particular card model?