this is bound to happen to the best of us. we all think, “i went with the 6-port full size ATX motherboard and i’ll never use all of those!” next thing you know, somehow, you can easily justify why all of those drives are necessary and there is no way you can part with them. so now what do you do?
i will tell you what not to do, do not under any circumstances buy a pcie controller card. they look like this:
the reason you dont want these is because they dont play nice with server operating systems, specifically, software controlled raid. no one in their right mind uses hardware raid anymore and with one of these, your software raid will not work reliably.
the issue is your OS needs to have direct access to your hard drives to manage them properly, and this card gets in the way of that. what you need is a card that passes the drives straight through to the OS without anything getting in the way. those kind of cards are called host bus adapters (HBAs).
an HBA looks like this:
this is an LSI 9211-8i. you can get one on ebay for ~$50 with cables (more on those in a minute). you notice two things about it immediately: its big and takes a full pcie slot, and those plugs on the back arent like anything you have probably ever seen before.
when shopping for one of these, if youre a beginner, look for ones that have been flashed into “IT Mode”. these are some really nifty cards that can do lots of things, but people with servers only need them to pass those drives through, and not try to control them with the chips you see on the card. IT mode passes the drives through and allows your server OS to control the drives without any middle-man, which is what you want.
unfortunately, your drives do not plug directly into the card. the ports at the back of this card are called mini-SAS connectors (SFF-8087). what we need are SATA ports because we most likely have SATA HDDs. to change the SFF-8087 into SATA ports, we need a forward breakout cable. specifically, these:
this is pretty self explanatory: on one end we get the SFF-8087 and on the other we get 4 x SATA connectors. our hard drives will still need SATA power cables from our PSU, but the card + this cable will allow us to access the drives from our server OS. you’ll notice the card i used as an example ends in “8i” and thats on purpose. the “8” represents the number of drives we can add using this cable. each one of these cables takes a single SFF-8087 and turns it into 4 SATA ports, and our example card has two SFF-8087 ports. if you needed to add more than 8 drives, look for a card that ends in “16i”, or if you only need to add 4 drives, a “4i”.
i know this sounds complicated for something as simple as adding hard drives, but its really easy. ill break it down into 3 steps:
- go to ebay and buy a card in a listing like this (i found it by searching LSI 9211-8i, sorting by lowest price, then scrolling until i found one with cables included):
- plug in the card and attach the cables to your new hard drives
- turn on your server. everything should just work. no, really.
