Additional SATA Controller and RAID

[Lebeouf]

Hi, I am new to the forum today and would really appreciate some help. I have just purchased a used HP Z620 (dual E5-2690 with 96GB and Quadro K4000). The intention is to have a multiboot config with VMWare ESX 6.5 as the primary O/S (dual Windows 2016 Server Standard VM), also with Win 10 Pro and Linux Red Hat dedicated installs (max use of hardware for mining with dual GTX1070 and SLI).

I had planned to use this with 3 x 500GB SSD (RAID 5) and 3 x 3TB HDD (RAID 5). I have purchased all of the components and appreciate that I have made incorrect assumptions about how easy this would be.

I cannot see  more that 3 disks when installing via the BIOS or when installing via Windows. When reading the detailed spec and blogs , I see the SATA is 2 x SATA 3 (6GBPS) and 4 x SATA 2 (3GBPS), also that RAID is software rather than hardware only supporting RAID 0,1 and 10. I have come to the conclusion that my options are;

(1) to reduce the config to dual SSD and dual  HDD both with RAID 1 (but can still only see 3 x drives), or;

(2) add a seperate SATA Controller 8 Port SATA 3 and a seperate RAID Controller. I have found a SATA controller card that looks suitable (Syba SI-PEX40071), and I also see through that there are a couple of compatible RAID cards  (LSI 9217-4i4e or LSI 9270-8i).

I am look for some guidance, is option 2 feasible and if so, how difficult is it to achieve. Would the SATA controller be compatible? do I need to disable the Mobo SATA Controller?,  would I be able to control the new SATA and RAID controller independently of O/S?. Also I see that the compatible RAID controllers are SAS / SATA and I have no use for SAS, so is this appropriate or would a different RAID card be better?

I appreciate this is actually a lot of questions, but any help and guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Ian

[DGroves]

you picked a poor system for crypto mining, while the z620 is a great system it's a very, very compact system

and not suited to mining due to 

1. power supply is non standard and only has a 800 watt supply,.... mining and tripple video cards will most likely kill it quite quickly

2. the system is not designed to hold 3 video cards, installing them will most likely cause the power supply to fail

3. heat, the case is not designed for the heat output of 3 video cards

4. related to the above, if you have the optional second cpu card installed, then the  cpu's plus  video cards will  place a extreme load on the power supply

5. adding 5 hard drives to the above  config is simply asking for problems

6. sticking with ONE or TWO video cards,  all of your power supply issues go away and you stay withing the capabilities of the system even with 2 cpu's and 5 drives and you should have a nice working system

the z620 uses a x79 chipset and the intel ENTERPRISE RSTe  (note the small "e") driver package which has support for the C602 chipset which the z620 has

go to the HP driver page for the z620 and download the latest RSTe driver

yes, you can add a LSI SAS/SATA card, however this card will use either a 8x or 16x pci-e slot

the benefits of doing so are you get SATA 6gbps speeds and up to 12gbps SAS speeds that can support 8 drives and is bootable. 

the LSI card has it's own onboard bios which allows creation/managment of the drives

the LSI card can support BOTH SAS AND SATA at the same time if desired if using a 8 port card with SAS on 4, and SATA on the other 4 port channel, or all ports SAS/SATA

the LSI card will coexist with the onboard controller if desired or the LSI can have it's bios disabled allowing windows to access the card/drives the same as drives on the intel sata controller if desired

i do not recomend any of the pci-e SATA 6 cards, their support in vmware is poor to non existant and while advertised as sata 6gbps cards read the disclamer which says  "UP TO" xxxx speeds not sustained speeds like the LSI cards provide

last keep in mind that there are two clases of addind HD cards.

the first one is called a "HBA" type card, it will not support raid in hardware and simply just adds more SATA ports

the other card is a true "Raid" card it has onboard Ram/cpu for "x-or" parity calcuations used in raid

most of these cards are RAID only and will not do JBOD (just a bunch of disks)

there are exceptions to the above, as some Raid cards are able to do true JBOD, and support just adding SATA ports

like a HBA only card. but these cards are very pricy

i recomend you look at the LSI 9270-8i or 9260-8i SAS/SATA card on ebay, it's a true Raid card, and has full vmware suport and driver support for just about any os thet was ever used

http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/getpdf.aspx/c04111527.pdf?ver=5