Question 1

This came with the sas to sata break out cable. But what is the sgpio cable? I am not sure what its for or where to connect it. Will there be any problem if i dont connect it? Thank you.

Accepted Answer

Short answer: It's for the blinken lights, you don't need it.
Longer answer:  The SGPIO (SFF-8485) signals are interpreted into blinking light-emitting diodes (LEDs) on disk arrays and storage backplanes.  You know that little HDD LED that blinks on the from of a normal computer when the hard drive is accessing data?  This SGPIO cable connects to a backplane, or server case to light up LED's for every hard drive connected to the RAID card.  Frequently there are 2 (presence/activity and status)or 3 LED's (presence/activity, locate, and fail) for each hard drive.

Question 2

I am hoping to get one of these but before i do i want to know how much i can do with it. My initial hope is to raid as many 1Tb SSDs as possible to where the r/w speed is multiplied such as that in raid 0 and have a backup HDD to protect the data on the raided SSDs. I am willing to get multiple high capacity HDDs to back it up. So my question is, is this possible? If so, what would be the best way of going about it? If not, what options do i have to maintain several Terabyte capacity with SSD or faster read/write speeds? If it will help, i have one PCIe 2.0 slot available and 5 SATA III ports available on my motherboard and i am running Windows 8.1 Pro. Hard drive bays are not a factor.

Accepted Answer

I'm not sure how to answer that exactly.  I think your question goes a little bit beyond the specifications of this card.  You can definitely set up a Raid 0 array of 1TB SSD's with this card.  The top speed might be less than the top speed of all the SSD's together; but I would expect it to be very quick!   Backing up those SSD's with HDD's is another problem that is probably best solved by connecting the hard drives to the computer using a different controller, and them using software like Bacula to manage the backup.  If you tried to connect them all to this card in a raid 50 or 60 (in perfect sync all the time), then the SSD's would be constantly waiting for the slower hard drives to catch up.

Question 3

Will this Intel controller card (RT3WB080) compatible with SuperMicro X8DAH+-F server board?

Accepted Answer

I cant say with 100% certainty, but based off a quick glance of the motherboard specs, I see no reason why it wouldn't be. I suggest checking the Intel website for a hardware compatibility list to be 100% certain. I cant recall off the top of my head which model board I used, but it was a consumer grade Intel board that supported Ivey Bridge chips, and it worked just fine.

Question 4

Will this card support 6 drives in RAID-6; + 1 additional hot spare?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it will directly attach to up to 8 drives, 6+1 would be no problem.  If you want to connect to more than 8 drives you would need to get a SAS expander.

Question 5

Read a review and says that it does not support SAS drives. Is that true? or can that be solve with a firmware upgrade? I want to purchase this to install into a Dell Poweredge R710. Will it work for this server? Thank you.

Accepted Answer

Sort of?   Per the manual (rt3wb080_hardwareguide.pdf) this card supports only SATA hard drives directly; but it can be connected to a SAS or SATA backplane, or an expander device.  I don't know for sure if that means that you could connect a SAS drive into an expander, and then the expander into this card.  I wouldn't count on it.

Question 6

Does this controller support 4tb drives?

Accepted Answer

I dont see why not but currently i am using 4 2tb drives, works great.

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