Tag: lsi

NEW LSI 9300-16i 12Gbps SAS-3 PCIe x8 HBA P16 IT mode ZFS TrueNAS UNRAID (WHL #94)

Here’s a quick and simple one: Cooling advice for 16-port SAS cards.

The LSI 9300-16i cards have gotten surprisingly cheap over the past months. Dirt cheap, in fact. All-16 port SAS cards are traditionally pretty pricey, even though they are “just” two 8-port cards on one PCB. In the past 10, maybe 15 years, there was never a time when buying a 16-port card (used or new) was cheaper than buying two 8s. Sure, sometimes people needed a single-card solution (availability of PCIe slots, PCIe lanes, or space in general), but the usual recommendation for 16-bay chassis like my Supermicro 836 was always to buy 2×8 instead of 1×16. […]


Supermicro 815 1U case 2,5″ HDD and RAID card battery holder (#P40)

New year, new hardware. Given space (in general, as well as in this specific case) is limited, old hardware has to go. So it’s about time post this 3D printed thingy, since the related hardware is about to be sold.

Now, the Supermicro 815 case, CSE815, SC815 or whatever prefix is en vogue nowadays, is one of those 1U pizza boxes. Shout-out to Supermicro for using webp images on their website already – but sticking to 261 x 222 px resolution for the full-size file.

Anyway, these come in two dozen varieties plus the EOL ones, and all of them have four 3.5″ HDD hotplug caddies in the front and some 1 to 3 card slots in the back, since it is a tiny case at 1U or 44mm height regardless of the 19″ width. […]


Not-so random thoughts on LSI HBAs again (#P34F1)

A couple months ago I scraped on the surface of the topic of LSI debranding/crossflashing. Now’s a good time to visit that again, since I got another branded LSI card that I wanted free of the manufacturers old firmware and the “hey look at meeee, I’m a veeeery special controller” look in any device tree. Yes, we know you’re special, but the annoying kind of special. You’ve likely been the default card in tens of thousands of servers or the only (supported) choice people had when opting for external SAS. […]


Random thoughts on Supermicro Risers, LSI LBAs, power supplies, ZFS and other fun server things (#P34)

With the failed 450W SFX power supply separated into a regular post last week, now’s the time to waffle on about what happened besides that.

Well, Solaris 11.4 (evil developer/home use licensing, so no current service packs) still uses minimal ashift as default instead of a fixed value of 12. ashift is the exponent of the power of 2 that is used as smallest assignable portion of data, so basically sector size. “Old” default is 9, as 2^9 is the well known 512 byte sector size that most old hard disks had as both logical and physical size, and which they reported as such. […]