Reddit reviews IBM Serveraid M1015 SAS/SATA Controller 46M0831
We found 12 Reddit comments about IBM Serveraid M1015 SAS/SATA Controller 46M0831. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Internal Connectors: 2 x SFF-8087 mini-SASInterface: PCI-Express 2.0 x8This RAID controller provides connectivity to internal direct-attach or expander-attached hard disk, solid-state, or self-encrypting drives.
the m1015 is a trusty favorite. No external ports, though.
I use these spliters for more SATA power connectors and These hotswap cages for housing the drives. They are often on sale at newegg for $40-60, this card Flashed to IT mode will add another 8 sata connections via two sas connectors(sff-8087) via a breakout cable
Currently I am running 8x3tb drives in my pc with a gtx 970 and my 550watt PSU handles it just fine.
I'm a fan of the IBM M1015 which is commonly recommended for FreeNAS builds; it's a rebadged LSI card and can be easily reflashed to run in HBA mode.
They're pretty cheap for RAID cards, and I've had good luck finding free ones in decommissioned servers at work. I also have heard they're relatively easy to find cheaply on ebay.
My original setup went like this:
I have an IBM m1015 I picked up off of eBay and flashed to IT mode so that the drives are passed straight through and no RAID functionality of the card is used.
One of the two ports from it was connected via an SFF-8087 SAS cable to a double SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 adapter, but you can go single as well.
Then an SFF-8088 SAS Cable ran from the adapter to an external case with an HP SAS Expander in it. There are many, many, other models of expanders but this is what I went with because it has the external SAS SFF-8088 port on it (it's not the only one that has this feature, but it's what I went with, and it makes it so every enclosure doesn't need its own motherboard).
All the ports off the expander then went to the backplanes in the external case and connected the drives to the IBM m1015 through the expander.
Since the 4224 did not have a motherboard at the time I used this thing that's usually used for crypto currency mining to provide power to the expander because that's all it needs from its PCIe interface (many of those other models of expander have a Molex connector in it for power and no PCIe interface at all).
As for daisy chaining SAS enclosures, it can be done, but I haven't gotten that far in my storage adventures yet. I do know that there are enclosures that support it and if I were to expand from where I'm at now it's probably the route I would go. Rolling my own was fun and all but sometimes you just want to plug and play.
I'll concur with A_watcher that eSATA enclosures are crap. Or at least the one I've used was as well.
I think that address the questions that were in the OP as well as posed to others that responded.
I'm ridiculously far from an expert, and my setup has changed a lot since the first way it was set up, but I think it was pretty close and answered those questions.
*Many the guys over at /r/datahoarder are much more knowledgeable in this arena than I am and are another source of information when it comes to storage.
I've looked a little into HBAs, since you mentioned them, and I'm definitely intrigued! Probably a dumb question, but I had trouble finding an answer: Would I be able to use an HBA in addition to the onboard SATA ports or does it replace them? If I were to follow your setup, I'd need to do the following:
Does that seem correct or did you follow a different set of steps?
Once again, thanks for taking the time to help me out with this! If I can get an HBA working, it seems like it would be a major improvement, allowing me to get the most out of my setup! :D
M1015 apparently was what I was thinking of:
https://www.amazon.com/IBM-Serveraid-M1015-Controller-46M0831/dp/B0034DMSO6
You can (almost always) find them cheaper on ebay.
Here's the guide I used to flash mine:
https://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
No, the Perc doesn't work well because it doesn't present the attached drives as individual raw drives. It's either a bunch of RAID0 (with a single drive) or RAID1/5/10. You need something like a M1015 that allows for JBOD (just a bunch disks) to be attached and presented to the OS.
Then in ESXi, you use PCI Passthrough to tell EXSi to give full access/control of the M1015 to your NAS VM.
Thanks, although I was referring to the card that he's pairing this with. Most likely in this sub the IBM ServeRaid m1015
Thanks. Sounds like a good plan. Note that "replacement... card" won't help you if it's the same model number. It's not a fault in a bad HBA card, but a limitation on it, so every single SI-PEX40064 card is going to be a bottleneck on the drives connected to it.
Here is a FreeNAS Forum post about choosing an HBA/RAID card. This is generally considered the best card for FreeNAS when it's in IT mode, which comes from that forum post.
Obviously it's much more expensive than your current one, but you get what you pay for, unfortunately, when it comes to RAID/HBA cards and bandwidth/features.
One important note: That "8GB is the minimum" comment is only relevant for when you are using ZFS on FreeNAS. UFS does not need more than 4GB in most cases, but 8GB is the recommended minimum for ZFS.
This amount of storage is begging for ZFS on Freenas. A 15-drive RAID-Z3 would yield 48TB of storage with triple-redundancy. For any kind of data storage, ZFS provides much higher levels of data integrity than other file systems, but with this much data, it's practically essential along with proper server hardware and ECC memory.
A Freenas build would substitute:
The SSDs could be used as dedicated L2ARC and ZIL devices to intelligently accelerate reads and writes.
This seems to give a value of ~250W for the power requirements; I gather one PSU should be sufficient.
EDIT - Freenas is designed to be booted from a USB-flash drive; this can be connected directly to a header on the motherboard. The M1015 acts as dumb SATA ports, and not as a RAID controller. When rebuilding a degraded array, unlike a conventional RAID volume, a ZFS RAID-Zn volume only writes data to the new disk in proportion to how full the volume is. And the array described above would easily saturate both gigabit ethernet adapters on the motherboard.
Yeah, it's going to be a bit of a project :)
From my reading it seems like freenas is fine virtualized as long as you use a supported HBA (I'm going to use one of these https://www.amazon.com/IBM-Serveraid-M1015-Controller-46M0831/dp/B0034DMSO6) and have pci passthrough.
PFsense is definitely also going to be work to set up, but lots of people seem to have done it so I'm excited for the challenge.
I've got an IBM ServerRAID M1015 without the bracket so you can add either a full height or low profile bracket. $45 shipped.