Reddit reviews Intel RAID Expander Card (RES2SV240)
We found 4 Reddit comments about Intel RAID Expander Card (RES2SV240). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Low-cost alternative to high port count RAID cards, Inside-the-box design flexibilityLSI* LSISAS 2x 24 SAS/SATA expander to enable communications with 24-ports at 3 Gb/s or 6 Gb/sExcellent performance, with transfer rates of up to 6Gb/s per port, Eight SFF8087 SAS/SATA connectors for attaching up to 24 targets or initiatorsCompatible with Intel's current and future RAID productsThoroughly tested across Intel’s SAS-2 RAID product line to ensure ease of deployment and backed by a 3-year warranty
If you are going to go with the LSI 9211-8i I'd pair it with a Intel RES2SV240 there are two advantages with it. One being it supports Sata III and you don't need a second PCI-E slot to house the card it can be powered by a single molex.
The 9211-8i is plenty capable of running a ton of drives. Each SAS channel is 6Gbps and the card has 8 of them. So effectively, there is 8GBps available in the card. PCI-e 2.0 8x cannot even handle the full bandwidth of the card. Given that a spinning rust hard-drive might give your 130MBps at the best of times, then, with PCI-e 8X, you need to have 30 HDDs at full bandwidth to saturate the bus.
Source
You will need one SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 to from the LSI 9211-8i to the Intel RES2SV240 and then you will need 6x SFF-8087 to SATA breakout cables. That would give you 24 sata connections..
If you wanted to have more bandwidth capable stuff it would cost a bit more and would require a motherboard with PCI-E 3.0 as well as the HBA to support PCI-E 3.0 I believe that card was the LSI 9311-8i
x8/x8 is fine.
PCIe 2.0 x8 is enough to run ~20 drives at 120MB/s (each) on a single card. And to even get that many drives, you'd need to use a SAS Expander.
Honestly, an 8i card with an expander may be a better idea. It gets you about 24 drives (or 40 with two expanders), and may be cheaper than the 16 port card.
https://www.amazon.com/Intel-RAID-Expander-Card-RES2SV240/dp/B0042NLUVE
Heck, it actually recommends a SAS9211-8i card here. That's exactly what you'd want.
RAIDZ1 and you will have a significant chance to lose all of that data on a rebuild and have to restore from backup. If you don't have backups, even worse.
RAIDZ2 with 8x6 tb drives should give you 36 tb of storage. Up the drives, get a proper interface card and use solely that because that motherboard only supports 6 sata ports alone and it's over 2 controllers. You wouldn't want to have your drives spread over two different chipsets of sata controllers in the same pool would you?
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-RAID-Expander-Card-RES2SV240/dp/B0042NLUVE - something like that run it with RAID turned off, and update firmware I think is required to make it function with FreeNAS from what I have read. This gives you 24 drives worth of ports.
They have these used on ebay sometimes as well. Many people confirms this works with FreeNAS, but I have no personal experience with this specific card.
As others said you need unbuffered ECC RAM for that motherboard (I have the same one).
Watercooling totally unnecessary and potentially a worse solution than a regular cooler because the pumps die on watercoolers more frequently than fans and you can always replace fans on the heatsinks. Heatsinks never fail.
7200 reds as well as said elsewhere, paying extra for the 7200s when 5400s are sufficient. 5400's are more than fast enough.
Interesting thank you I will have to do more research on cases.
So regarding sas expander:
does this work with the motherboard i specified?
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-RAID-Expander-Card-RES2SV240/dp/B0042NLUVE/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1409100717&sr=1-1
Do I just take a cable and plug one end into sas port on the mobo and another into the sas expander?