I finally was able to get my hands on some quality Host Bus Adapters, which means I’ll finally be able to set up a proper ZFS network storage pool for my home network!
The SAS 9207-8i Host Bus Adapters are great for the price and can be found used for around $50 or less if you do some patient shopping around.
At the heart of this card is the LSISAS2308 6Gb/s SAS/SATA hybrid controller and offers:
- 8 SAS/SATA lanes @ 6Gb/s — totaling to 48Gb/s
- PCIe3.0 8x (8Gb/s per 1x lane) — a 64Gb/s connection to the mainboard
- 2 mini-SAS connectors (SFF8087) — full 48Gb/s SAS/SATA connection speed to the storage devices
I plan to install one of these HBAs in my HP Proliant DL380P Gen8 server, which has a 12 drive LFF (3.5″) backplane with 2 mini-SAS connectors for connection to the HBA.
Then I plan to create a ZFS storage pool, on FreeNAS Operating System inside of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 6.5 Update 2, with 10x 2TB HDDs and 2x 240GB SSDs.
Of course all of this may take some time, as I’m currently in my Summer quarter at college and have a lot on my plate already and I want to do some more in-depth testing before committing to the current build-plan.