I need some help for a cheap lowpower NAS i am about to build.
Since my chosen mainboard doesn’t have enough SATA ports, i was looking for ways to add more.
The common advise I‘ve come across, is to use an HBA card like LSI SAS 9200-8e or similiar instead of cheaper SATA expansion cards like this
But when I was researching mainboards I also came across recommendations for boards like this which provides 6 sata ports.
The mainboard and the sata card use similiar chips (ASM1166 and ASM1064) to provide the additional ports. Is there any difference there? Why is the mainboard often recommended but the card is not? Does it really make a difference if the chip is on the board vs on an expansion card?
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There’s a youtuber that goes by the name Wolfgang’s Channel. He’s basically got a series on making on making efficient NAS’s.
Basically, in terms of watts consumed, it’s better to not have an HBA card installed since they can prevent the system from preventing lower C states when idle. Thus having a board with more SATA ports is better since you won’t need an HBA card.
Here’s a link to known power efficient setups.
If you still want to go the add in route, I think the consensus is that SATA add in cards aren’t as reliable as HBA cards, but HBA cards are more power hungry. Here’s a link to HBA add in cards’ power consumption.
Also, if you have HDDs, 5400 rpm drives consume less power than 7200 rpm drives.
At a certain point you’re spending more money than you save in your power bill, but I can’t deny that its fun making your build as efficient as possible.
Like other people have said, it’s going to depend on what you want to do with the NAS. If it’s going to be a pure NAS (ie network storage only), then using onboard will be fine. If you plan on doing other things (home assistant, media server, etc), I recommend going the virtual machine + HBA route.
My understanding is that hba cards support virtualization better than passing sata directly through. But if you’re not virtualizing the NAS, I wouldn’t see an issue with a reputable motherboard that has enough sata ports at 6 Gbps.
For the cheaper expansion cards I’d see that as a central point of failure and would recommend an hba card over a cheaper alternative.
I don’t have hands on experience with this, but I can say that once you move into addon cards the chance for hotswap from drive bays goes up. Hotplug is a feature that many of the on board and lesser data chips don’t support well.