Microsemi Adaptec SmartHBA 2100-4i4e SAS controller - RAID levels?

[wny2016]

Have a Z4 G4 with a Microsemi Adaptec SmartHBA 2100-4i4e SAS controller, using it to run a RAID array with a pair of SATA drives, Samsung 870 1TB SSD. Setup with these new drives seems as expected. When in BIOS to set up the RAID, the available configuration for the 2 ports with these drives attached is either RAID0 or RAID1. The whole idea with this controller is that you can use these SATA drives (less expensive and only 6Gbps) without any problem. But all of the documentation on the controller shows RAID levels available are 0, 1, 5, 10. Why does the controller in the Z4 environment only offer RAID 0 or RAID1? Is it because of he slower SATA SSD drives? I don't see anything in the extensive controller documentation that might explain this. Does anyone know?  TIA!

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

while the card "could/can" do raid 5,....... HP has elected to not implement that feature when used in the workstations as the 2100 series is considered to be a low end card due to it  having only a small onboard cache that resides in the cards "ROC" chipset and no battery backup which will make the card rather slow if raid 5 is enabled in the cards firmware 

the earlier z820 had onboard raid using the LSI 2308 "mustang" ROC chip that had NO onboard cache/battery backup and in that case HP did enable the raid 5 option and it was extremely slow in raid 5 mode using mechanical drives and not useful at all if using ssd's

if you require a general purpose raid/JBOD card then the adaptec ASR 7/8 series cards are what you want to look at

the ASR-8805 or the ASR-7805

currently the 7 series cards on ebay  can be found for as little as 12.00 and this seller is including the optional cache module (the AFM-700 bbu module can be found for about 20.00 also on ebay)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/175190670313?epid=7052195783&hash=item28ca2d7be9:g:pSMAAOSw2-diJs08&amdata=...

https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/raid/sas_raid/asr-8805/

https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/raid/sas_raid/sas-7805/

[wny2016]

Thank you! Very helpful and detailed explanation.