It's A Digital Disease!

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/soy_tetones_grande on 2025-06-10 02:53:30.

I have a X11SSM-F

I have an HP SAS 9205-8i (it's pcie 3 x8) which is connected to 8 HDDs

My free pcie slots are pcie 3.0 x4... But I believe x4 for 8 HDDs is more than enough and won't have any bottleneck.

I have 2x 125gb SSDs attached the motherboard SATA ports for my boot drive (mirrored).

So I want to add a New 2nd pool of 8x drives.

I'm wondering, would it be better to simple grab another HP SAS 9205-8i and use my last remaining pcie 3 x4 slot for the other 8 HDDs?

Or get a single 16i card and connect all 16 to pcie slot?

My initial thoughts after research:

1. I've read that the 16i gets very hot.

2. I'm assuming splitting the pools between different pcie slots on two separate SAS cards would also theoretically prevent bottlenecks? Since pcie 3 x4 is 4GB/s so 8 drives on each would be totally fine (~270 MBs x 8 = ~2GB/s).. where as 16 drives would push it to the max and maybe bottleneck.

3. I also would think it's maybe safer to have both pools on Seperate expansion cards? If one expansion card was to fail, it won't take down both pools?

Downsides?

1. I use up my final pcie slot

2. more power consumption with ~10w per SAS card. But hey, I'm running 16 drives of spinning rust so that's like a drop in the ocean.