Mac Compatible RAID card for JBOD? (Ventura Update)

[c-o-pr]

This is a followup to the thread "Mac Compatible RAID card for JBOD?"

[For anyone purchasing a new JBOD HBA, see later post in this thread on StarTech HBA which works with macOS natively.

If you want to use an LSI 9207-8i keep reading here]

My build is a late model, 11th gen z590, running Monterey 12.4.

After troubleshooting two $50 PCIe 8-port SATA cards (not SAS) which fail with not all drives are detected, and those that are are detected unreliably (although if detected they work), I came across plenty of lore that says LSI and variant SAS HBA is the way to go.

I used the information provided in the previous thread to choose an LSI 9207-8i for $100 US, no cables. You can find these plus cables for less if you look. This is a PCIe3 card with 8 ports, no RAiD.

This card is not natively supported by 12.4.

But by what feels like sheer luck, another user posted AstekFusion2 drivers claimed to be compatible with these chips, and they are... I've attached the same drivers I found at the previous post.
AstekFusion2Adapter.kext
AstekFusion2Family.kext

To make them work, place them both in /Library/Extensions:
sudo chown -R root:wheel /Library/Extensions/AstekFusion2* sudo chmod -R 755 /Library/Extensions/AstekFusion2*

You should receive an alert from macOS that legacy extensions have been detected.

If you don't see an alert, try:
sudo touch /Library/Extensions

Got to System Preferences > Security & Privacy to permit the extensions to run.

Reboot.

Use your drives, up to 8.

This adapter is reported to support SATA port-multiplexor, but I can't get it to work.

Required cables are Mini-SAS to SATA, SFF-8087 allowing connection of SATA drives. These are 3 foot cables with clips. Power must be supplied with a separate cable.

BIOS will see attached drives and allow booting. There are reports there may be sleep issues.

See the following thread for a lot more info...

OSX HBA IT mode cards

looking for how a 2008 based card like a 9212-4e4i or similar in IT mode can run in a mac OS X 10.11 looking for ZFS support and cant get the card to be recognized in OS X on a hackintosh.. can see the card fine in bios.. dont need boot dont want raid .. just IT mode since ZFS needs the...

forums.servethehome.com

Drives appear as external / removable to macOS.

The following Clover lore comes from InsanelyMac

"if you want the drives attached to the LSI Fusion adapter to show up as internal, just add this patch to the KextsToPatch section in Clover"
— I have not investigated this config.

<dict> <key>Comment</key> <string>Astek Fusion 2 Fix External</string> <key>Disabled</key> <false/> <key>Find</key> <data> PHN0cmluZz5FeHRlcm5hbDwvc3RyaW5nPg== </data> <key>InfoPlistPatch</key> <true/> <key>Name</key> <string>AstekFusion2Adapter</string> <key>Replace</key> <data> PHN0cmluZz5JbnRlcm5hbDwvc3RyaW5nPg== </data> </dict>

SUMMARY

My goal was to get 8 JBOD working on a z590, 11th gen, 12.4 and this worked for me.

 

[etorix]

If I may contribute with my (limited) NAS experience.

After troubleshooting two $50 PCIe 8-port SATA cards (not SAS) which fail with not all drives are detected, and those that are are detected unreliably (although if detected they work), I came across plenty of lore that says LSI and variant SAS HBA is the way to go.

LSI SAS controllers are indeed the industry standard. These are 10-15 W chips running their own little OS and expect some airflow from the case to cool them.
If you put them in a Linux- or FreeBS-based NAS, the firmware version matters a lot for reliable operation.

I used the information provided in the previous thread to choose an LSI 9207-8i, for $100 US, no cables. You can find these plus cables for less if you look. This is a PCIe3 card with 8 ports, no RAiD.

9200 are rather long in the tooth by now. These are PCIe 2.0 cards!
The current recommendation would be a 9300 card (PCIe 3.0).

This adapter is reported to support SATA port-multiplexor, but I can't get it to work.

SATA port multiplexers are not reliable. Never.
Use SAS expanders instead.

Required cables are Mini-SAS to SATA, SFF-8087 allowing connection of SATA drives. These are 3 foot cables with clips. Power must be supplied with a separate cable.

Danger here!
SAS controllers (and expanders) support SATA drives. SATA controllers do not support SAS drives.
SAS runs at higher voltage and allows for longer cables. Upon detecting a SATA drive, a SAS controller would drop signalling voltage; any SAS drive in the mix will happily chatter at the lower voltage instead of shouting at their usual loudness, but this limits all drives to SATA cable length. If possible, though, it's best not to mix SAS and SATA drives on the same cables/same connector.
For reliable operation over time, get shorter (50 cm) breakout cables. I had a NAS set up with 75 cm cables from LSI HBA to SATA drives. After some time, ZFS began complaining that the pool was degraded, several drives reported CRC errors through SMART monitoring, and the number of errors was growing fast. Replacing the breakout cables with shorter ones solved the issue.

My goal was to get 8 JBOD working on a z590, 11th gen, 12.4 and this worked for me.

Good!
Of course, if the motherboard has enough SATA ports, it's possible to dispense with a HBA (and additional drivers!) and just make drive arrays with Disk Utility. Type diskutil ar create at the Terminal prompt to get basic help, or man diskutil for the full documentation.

 

[c-o-pr]

Great wise points, thanks for expanding on the matter.

Per PCIe 2 vs 3, this makes sense.
I will amplify that the application documentation provided by sellers is unreliable. Also prices vary widely. For my purposes, the bus bandwidth limit doesn't matter.

The tricky part today are drivers. According to the list in the old post, I expected this card to be natively supported, but it's not. At any moment a macOS update could sideline this card. I saw a post about success OOB with a Syba card, but it lacked details.

• What other cards are known to have native macOS support, if any?

There's a lot of lore about flashing IBM RAID versions for use with NAS in a mode called IT (Initiator / T-something). What is this about?

• Re cables, and warning about signaling and mixing SAS and SATA drives: Thanks for heads up!!

• Also heat and case application. Yes, I see this card is designed to run with a server airflow assumption.

• Re port expansion, can you hang a SATA drive off a SAS multiplexer?

Re PCIe lane allocations and adding more cards. I chose a new gaming board with 3 PCIx16 and 4 M.2, and found out out about various CPU generation and device combinations that lead to PCIe lane bifurcation configs and their limits by reading the fine print after purchase. In summary, there's not quite enough lanes to go around for all the slots and a "gamer" as opposed "creator" config mindset attends the config options. For example populating the last PCIe slots disables some SATA. In my config, I wanted full Apple Wifi support. There's no easy way to replace the Intel module built into the board, so I got a cheap Broadcom PCIe card (Note to noob's all modern wifi cards also require a USB header for the BT module.) Well, with a SAS/SATA expansion card and Wifi card, the board steals lanes from onboard SATA. So I had to get an M.2 adapter with E key and USB pigtail to add an NGFF Fenvi broadcom card to get my onboard SATA back. This worked OBB with decent performance — don't forget antennas that can reach outside the case.

* * *

Re onboard SATA: I ran into a problem with a bad new SATA cable that came with a cheap SATA adapter. This corrupted a HFS+ drive, which I successfully rebuilt with venerable DiskWarrior. That program has helped me several times when Disk Utility just barfs. It doesn't support APFS, but Idk if APFS suffers from same soft corruption as the old HFS+ format?

FAIR WARNING test your ports before committing precious data to config.

I also hit a weird snag where a BIOS option for onboard SATA, causes a woeful slowdown of drive IO by a backup program (CCC), but not the Finder! E.g., Finder copies run at full speed, but backup runs at 1/50th, like 2 Mb/s. It only affects a certain model of drive. It's related to either Aggressive Link Power Mgmt, or SMART, or both.
EDIT:

It appears signal integrity is a bugaboo for these commodities designs:

Common SATA Signal Integrity Issues | ASSET InterTech

Serial ATA (SATA)-based systems come in a wide range of topologies and trace/cable lengths. This presents signal integrity challenges due to signal loss, reflection and crosstalk; causing SATA device detection problems, lack of interoperability, slower performance, and increased radio frequency...

www.asset-intertech.com

I'm packing a bunch of drives and cables into a box every-which-way with no engineering consideration of noise and crosstalk. There's 17 different sources of EMI and no tools for tuning layout and transceivers. This is all stuff you pay Apple to get right for its products.

I'll need to look at SMART stats for link CRC errors to learn a bit more. But it's a messy matter. It could also be as nasty as interaction between noise caused by certain patterns of running code, certain data patterns to drive, and certain drives cause exponential CRC errors on some links.

I suspect these variables associated with cheap SATA cabling explains why there are so many bad stories with consumer grade SATA add-on cards. For PC kit, SATA was an enhancement to IDE built to signaling assumptions of consumer box with one hard drive and room to add one or two more. SCSI and therefore SAS are another matter. These had been engineered for more devices in denser arrangements, so not surprising that server kit tends to be more dependable.

OK IT'S A WRAP

At this point I think I've got all my SATA working (14 ports) plus Wifi/BT and room for a second NVMe drive if ever needed.

My goal to replace a 2008 Mac Pro is complete and it only took $4K in parts, a year to work through everything, and $20,000 of time. And I'm pretty sure it's not gonna throw all my data away and won't be obsolete for at least a year. Whee!

 

[etorix]

There's a lot of lore about flashing IBM RAID versions for use with NAS in a mode called IT (Initiator / T-something). What is this about?

LSI provides two firmwares for its cards: IT (Initiator Target, though I've also seen "Infrastructure"), which acts as a plain HBA, and IR (Internal RAID), which adds some RAID features.
LSI controllers are used by many vendors, which may then make their own custom IR firmware, possibly tied to a custom driver.
So ZFS users who get second-hand/refurbished SAS cards (say IBM M1015 or Dell Perc H200) spare no efforts to cross-flash their cards to LSI IT firmawre and make sure they have a generic (and reliable) LSI 2008/2308/3008 controller. (The LSI IR firmware should behave exactly as the corresponding IT firmware, with only slightly lower performance because IR has some overhead over IT. But the issue is with proprietary IR firmwares, which may have unwanted behaviour with the standard FreeBSD/Linux drivers.)

Re port expansion, can you hang a SATA drive off a SAS multiplexer?

Yes. The multiplexer is responsible for translating to SATA, and SATA cable length apply between the expander and SATA drives; the communication between controller and expander is SAS, and SAS cable length apply.

It appears signal integrity is a bugaboo for these commodities designs:

Yes. Thanks for the various horror stories!

General wisdom in NAS world is that the built-in SATA controllers from Intel and AMD chipsets are fine but that SATA Add-In Cards are bad. There might be some good cards out there, made from proper controllers rather than discarded parts which somehow failed to pass quality control and with no engineering hacks, but it's just not worth to spend the time and effort to sort them out of the bunch of data-eating crap from Shenzen back alleys…
If you need more ports for SATA drives, get a SAS HBA.

Which, for Hackintosh users, unfortunately involves making sure there is a macOS driver for the SAS controller.
I have no expertise about that: Spinning drives are confined to my NAS; desktop and laptop computers are SSD only.

 

[c-o-pr]

I seem to have resolved my internal SATA hiccups by re-cabling. I was seeing more unusual behavior where IOs to a certain drive slow way down, but strangely I can do IO to the same drive from another program at the same time and it moved ahead at speed. Very odd. I would swear I was dealing with a SW bug. One odd sign is the mainboard drive activity light comes on hard; doesn't pulse.

• Replaced all the internal SATA cables.
• Routed the USB3 gen1 and gen2 case cables away from the drive cables and put distance between cable groups where I could.

I can now run all my usual chores across all drives and everything feels good.

Haven't yet fully laid out the case, so not out of woods, but I think this is gonna work.

Thanks again for the tips.

 

[c-o-pr]

A followup on a natively supported JBOD SATA HBA:

I found Startech 8P6G-PCIE-SATA-CARD and gave it a try. It works natively and I've replaced the LSI with it.

The LSI 9207-8i worked reliably, but after seeing reports of 2 read errors on a drive connected the mobo onboard SATA — not the LSI — I began to think more about lack of SMART support on the LSI.

Also concerned about dependency on the 3rd party FusionTek kext that no-one appears to support any more and will be banned by Apple, possibly with Ventura.

The Startech is modeled after the LSI HBA and provides SAS-style cabling and reliable drive connections.

But this is a SATA card, it does not support SAS.

The Startech ended up being the same price as the old LSI and the Startech includes SFF-8087 cables, which doesn't happen to matter to me because I need longer cables, but if you can live with 0.5 meter cables you save $30.

Startech Pros:
• Works natively with macOS (I'm using Monterey), no additional driver required. [Update 2023, continues to work perfectly using Ventura 13.3]
• Also Windows and Linux support.
• Adds 8 ports, JBOD.
• Supports SMART.
• Includes SFF-8087 mini-SAS to SATA data cables, which will work with any SATA drive.
• Cables included are standard SATA length, 0.5 meter.
• Supports SATA port multiplier for additional ports.
• Ports run at drive speed as expected, no glitches.

Cons:
• Not bootable, UEFI does not see connected drive EFI partitions. I tried Legacy Option ROM and no dice.

Notes:
• Supports any size drive per SATA spec (this question is perennial).
• Drive power cabling not included.
• I am using longer SFF-8087 1 meter cables for a large case with no problem.
• I am using a Bewinner port multiplier, ADP6ST0-J05 SATA3 4-port Expansion Card: 1 source port, 5 drive ports, which expands by 4 ports for a total of 12 drives connected to this Startech.
• Using a port multiplier means upstream link capacity is shared with all downstream drives: plan your storage layout accordingly. I am seeing drives run at speed (e.g., 200+ MB/s sustained) to spinning drives over the multiplier. No performance surprises, works as expected.