Talos II arrived

[pocock]

My Talos II arrived yesterday, I'll be building it gradually over the next few days.

I already shared some observations about success with the Fractal 7 XL case, it would be really helpful to get some feedback about their fan hub connections

I'll use a legacy SATA HBA as a stop-gap measure until I get some U.2 disks in a few weeks.  Long term, can anybody comment on what will be a good choice of HBA to combine at least two U.2 disks and a handful of legacy SATA disks?

Can anybody make any other tips about getting started?

[madscientist159]

I like the LSI HBAs -- good open source Linux driver support, ubiquitous, stable, and they work just fine with the IOMMU active (the latter is important since every SAS HBA on the market uses a sizeable firmware binary on the card side of things).

Needless to say I also strongly recommend LUKS for data security and integrity purposes.

[pocock]

Do you mean these products?

https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters

For example:

9400-8i for NVMe+SATA, PCIe 3.1 x8, 8 internal ports, 2 HD Mini-SAS SFF8643

9500-8i for NVMe+SATA, PCIe 4.0 x8, 8 internal ports, 1 x8 SFF-8654 (SlimSAS)

Will the U.2 disks get full speed through either of these cards and their respective connectors?  Is there any reason to get the PCIe 4.0 version, or the older PCIe 3.1 card will be sufficient.

I'm thinking about workstation systems with 1 or 2 of the U.2 disks at most.

[MPC7500]

Here is an overview of working HBAs.