I’m looking at getting the the chassis, backplane, I will be getting a corsair 1000w psu (overkill) I’m wondering which HBA card to get that will support all the drives, as I will probably move over my i5-12400 + ram either using Proxmox or Unraid as the OS. Since the majority of it will be used as a plex media server along with some VM’s I’ve made. In the future I will be adding home assistant. I will also be adding an Nvidia 1060 in it for help with rendering/transcoding. I would also want to use it as storage so that I can edit my videos I record over my network.
I currently have 6 12tb Ironwolf’s and 5 WDC H530 14TB’s, I will be adding 3x20tb’s while the motherboard already has 2 m.2’s a 1tb, and 4tb.
Welcome Most posts here have been discussing Broadcom/LSI 9300-series, 9400-series or 9500-series — you can find the “16i” variants on eBay easily enough (for as little as $100).
45Drives has suggested previously that 9600-series may make it into the Store sometime soon (although these are expected to be $1000+ each).
Yikes. I’m sure eBay has 16i variants that are flashed to IT mode, if not is really isn’t that big of a deal. I could use the 16i I have in a test machine and use that. So far at this price it’s turning into a damn good deal.
LSI 9300-16i are going for @ $100 and the LSI 9400-16i are a little more than $200. Doesn’t sound like you’re going the full build route. Both have 12Gb/s. If you’re running spinning disks you should be fine. If you are mixing in SSD’s trim support varies.
1000w doesn’t honestly seem like overkill. Adding in a GPU, extra DIMM’s, a bunch of disks, etc. you’ll find you’ll start to creep up on that number. I’m a fan of oversizing PSU’s. If I remember and understand correctly, 50-60% of PSU is your sweet spot Take a look.
Now, as far as your question, I’m trying to understand completely what you’re asking. You said “What it will be used for” and I’m not sure if you’re asking for clarification as to what the HBA will be used for or if you’re looking for help finding one.
The group seems to have answered the latter question, but if I can offer some unsolicited advice regarding your statement of OS choice. I would personally tell you to go Proxmox, as it’s a more advanced bit of kit than something like unRAID. Proxmox being a proper hypervisor, allows you more flexibility over unRAID as you can run containers natively, along with having better support for ZFS.
unRAID runs BTRFS, which is nice if your goal is to add disks to a large pool/dataset over time with a large amount of flexibility. However, unlike ZFS, your reads and writes are single disk and do not gain any of the performance or data integrity ZFS provides.
unRAID - (Yes, ZFS exists, but it’s not as mature)
You want a large system you can gradually add storage to and not create individual datasets.
You care more about flexibility of a single storage array and ease of expansions.
You would prefer a built in “app store” approach to your containers, and are fine with having most of the configuration obfuscated from you.
Proxmox -
You prefer data integrity and R/W performance over ease of expansion (there are ways to expand, such as adding mirrored pairs to your Pool.)
You want more than just ZFS and BTRFS, and would prefer more control over your storage options.
You’re looking to add VM’s and containers natively (LXC containers for example)
You would like finer control over your virtual networks and mini environments.
You may want to cluster your hosts in the future for HA and expansion purposes, while managing them from a single control plane.
Most posts here have been discussing Broadcom/LSI 9300-series, 9400-series or 9500-series — you can find the “16i” variants on eBay easily enough (for as little as $100).