active cooling, which I understood is basically required for a non-datacenter computer. And I couldn't make use of any fan on the HBA, because even the thinnest one (1cm) would have been blowing air literally onto the PSU
This is a misunderstanding of the situation. Active cooling is not required. Airflow, on the other hand, is.
In a typical rack mount, you have a fan bulkhead between the front drive bays and the rear mainboard section. This causes a strong front-to-back airflow, as long as you have a well vented mounting bracket on the rear end.
I couldn't make use of any fan on the HBA, because even the thinnest one (1cm) would have been blowing air literally onto the PSU
Mounting a fan on the HBA is generally foolish; you are causing a tiny fan to bake, and when it inevitably fails in a few years, your HBA will toast, which is really bad, because it is one of the things that can destroy a ZFS pool (HBA feeding semirandom gibberish out to the pool). What you really want is to have ideally at least two high quality fans pushing air across the PCIe card area. You want the static pressure inside the case to be higher than outside the case as well, and then the bracket to be something like the Supermicro BKT-0066L / 0174L with the large easy-flow holes to encourage airflow along the card and out the back.
So, my question is, are there any SAS HBAs that don't require active cooling?
So again I think the insertion of the word "active" corrupts the question. They all require
cooling. None of them require
active cooling. Most of them require a
well-designed cooling strategy.
Which I think could mean any non-LSI HBAs?
Well, it's been more than ten years into this project, and credible alternatives have not appeared. The driving forces behind the HBA selection logic are generally documented in this article:
1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...
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If we look realistically at the big picture, SATA has died an untimely death due to the inability of the industry to agree to a 12Gbps SATA standard; they didn't even try that hard. They more-or-less decided (correctly) that it didn't matter for HDD, and for SSD, there was 12Gbps SAS. But that in turn died an untimely death due to NVMe. Back before the doomball started rolling, we had, at least: Adaptec, PMC-Sierra, Microsemi, 3Ware, LSI, Broadcom, ASMedia Technology, and several others. Through various mergers and acqusitions, this once diverse list of players has imploded, and there really isn't a bright future to the SATA/SAS chipset business. So we also don't expect there to be new magic solutions.
If you are going SATA-only, there might be an argument to be made to try an ASMedia controller. They are known to be decent as long as you don't get a knockoff or one that involves a SATA port multiplier.
This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. In the last year or two, we’ve had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use...
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