Real science tries to disprove it's self, that's how you can tell a real science from fake science. Global warming caused my man and CO2 is fake science. It's all cherry picked data there is no antithesis,
@@KienTran a 1GB Pi3 is more than enough to run basic storage ZFS without dedup or anything too fancy. We run 8TB+ pools 1GB x86 boxes and have done for a couple of years without a single bit lost (sample size 300+ units, 6PB total) The (old Atom 330) boards in use are constrained by 1 slot of RAM so the max installable is 2GB - but we cannot renew or upgrade the hardware as they are all deployed in very remote locations and run 24/7 True, they suffer from bottlenecking on intense random workloads but the boxes are fine for typical NAS use. We also run 20 or more RasPi 3's on ZoL doing the same...
Brilliant, nothing like cobbling together a raid array from parts. I've been waiting for something like this for the Raspberry PI for ages,thanks for doing this.
I can't believe you're even trying this! There's a reason people buy giant PC cases and mount all their hardware inside. This is so dumb, why am I even watching this video?!
My favourite part about this video is how honest it was about all the little "gotchas" that arose during the project. To me, that's where the value is --- learning about where things can go sideways, as opposed to watching a video where everything goes according to the plan. Thanks for sharing!
@@JeffGeerling Not so, hence the mistake as was £100 part in larger sale. But SAS card once I get around to it seemed good idea and did like the specs heat tollerance wise as had idea's of loft NAS. Still probably go with old x86 pc I have, though the RPi or arm based avenue would be my choice. WHY oh why don't they make some SAS to USB3 adapter that are fair price, think found one and that was half a grand :(. Certainly a market here for a fair priced one.
Jeff, I love your videos! You have genuine content rather than rehashed stuff that 50 other people have published. I've done a lot of the same things you have...using mdadm, hacking microcontrollers, and building Pi projects. So its great to see you being so organized and sharing your findings with the world. And I love your bloopers at the end of the videos. Thanks!
Very interesting video. I would love to see a video on compiling the Pi Kernel for stuff like this. Thanks for being so informative. People like you are what make the Raspberry Pi community so wonderful.
I have a list of some of the 'accessory' videos that I would like to make, including how to compile / cross-compile the kernel, how to flash the eMMC on the CM4, etc. - it's just there isn't enough time in my day to get to all this :( Maybe someday...
I am not a storage nutcase anymore, but used to collect old hard drives and this project brings back memories! Makes me want to see if my giant old external SCSI Mac drive still spins up!
For those thinking "go with a server": Server fans have a tendency to sound like vacuum cleaners. I have a HP Proliant that sounds like 3 carpet shampooers and that's normal for the model, not fan malfunction. Using 32 sticks of RAM, 4 CPU's, 8 HDD's, 11 expansion cards, and 2 power supplies, it can generate too much heat for a quiet set of fans. HP Proliant DL585 G2 server, BTW.
I am hoping with the rise in popularity ARM that more quiet and power efficient servers become available. Right now there aren't many choices still for ARM servers for sale. In the meantime, Supermicro makes some embedded servers that run on Intel Atom with passive cooling. I used to have one for my home lab but it had the infamous C2000 clock signal death and doesn't boot anymore. The newest generation of Atom processors (C3000) do not have this defect AFAIK. There are also the EPYC 3000 and Xeon-D choices in the embedded options but I don't know how those are in heat and noise.
I did this but with a rockpro64, an LSI 9211-4i HBA, 4x SAS 4TB drives, all in a 1U server chassis with hot swap bays. The rockpro64 has a 4x PCIE port and it all works together nicely running on Armbian OS and openZFS.
I used to think you were really smart. Maybe even "perfect". Then I started thinking: you always see bloopers for your videos but Red Shirt Jeff never seems to have bloopers. Maybe Red Shirt Jeff is smarter and never makes mistakes? I wonder if someday he will start making your videos for you!! HAHAHA
I would love for there to be a MiniITX form factor "motherboard" that you could slot a pi 4 computer module into instead of a CPU and RAM, would be interesting/cool and handy for some projects Alas I do not have the schematic/board layout knowledge to do something like that myself
I've considered working on this, if for no other reason than I've had a few close calls with the crazy contraptions I've been putting together on my desk.
This is such a great idea! it's much better than this old Lenovo Thinkserver with a chassis, 600W power supply, Xeon processor and 12GB of memory that I bought from my local e-waste recycling center for $35. I think once you've perfected this amazing solution I suggest you try it on a Samsung smart refrigerator. Then you'd have integrated cooling as well. In the icebox.
BTW. You can boot Rasberry Pi using UEFI, and load something like generic Debian, Ubuntu or Centos images and kernels. They are usually for arm64 servers that have UEFI (often called ServerReady in ARM speak, now ARM SystemReady SR), but with RPi4 firmware from pftf repo, it just works. These kernel usually have almost all modules compiled in as modules, so no need to recompile the kernel. Usually you will have access to all same modules as on x86 kernel on these distros (minus some x86 specific stuff, like some motherboard sensors, some ISA sounds drivers, etc), but almost all PCI / PCIe stuff (including hard drive controllers, raid cards, network cards, wifi, audio and video related cards, GPUs, etc) will be there. Anyway great video. I love experiments like that myself. As of the not-working RAID card, it is probably related to bios on these cards. They often need to initialize at boot, and their bios is often x86 only. Not all of them tho. Some of them can be initialized by linux drivers and firmware loaded by Linux. More investigation is required definitively. Also you do not need explain or apologize for your ideas, that some will consider silly. There is plenty of uses for a setup like this, and even if there is none, it is still fun, and you can learn many things from it.
The PCI slot for RPI is just what I have been waiting for, for a "one node - one disk" CEPH storage, though just having a SATA port directly on the PI would be so much easier.
Buying a 3 pack so you have a single spare??? You need to buy in bulk and order 20 extras, you know you are going to need them ! Great video as always I just did this same project but on my R730xd so it will support 44 drives. The lsi controllers with the firmware mod are fantastic. 10tb sas drives are 99 bucks now!
This is such an interesting concept for me, I really look forward to the next video. I have a couple projects I dont need a large server for so this is really intriguing for me, thank you!
mdadm is pretty sweet. My main NAS died and I moved the array to a backup machine. I have hot swappable drives and I put them in one at a time while tail-ing syslog. I watched each of the 9 drives get detected and when the last one went in I saw a msg from mdadm that said "hey I see an array here, you're all set!" Super painless and I didn't lose my 56TB of data!
Hi Jeff, interesting video. I wanted some network Pi based storage that I could store my files on and stream videos / music via Samba. I opted for OMV, 4x SSD, 4xUSB3 to SSD cables, a vertical USB3 powered hub, a single metal vertical SSD enclosure to store the 4xSSDs all screwed in. All told less than 10w electricity consumption for both Pi 4 2GB and USB hub together. I definitely did not want a fan running 24x365 for both power consumption and noise reasons. Everything stores on a small bookcase shelf. Sure SSDs are more expensive but I am happy with my 3.2 TB of network storage that I can upgrade at any time as SSDs become cheaper. Your choice of kit will kill mine anyday and I look forward to your next video.
Hey, if it works, it works! Just make sure you have backups (rclone to Amazon Glacier is my basic weapon of choice these days). My primary NAS that I use for video storage right now is a janky old Mac mini with four 2TB SSDs that I paid a few arms and legs for last year (used to be a couple giant HDDs but those things were noisy and slow to spin up).
When new raspberry pi and other sbc models start coming out in the next year or two, if they have pcie 4.0 nvme support that will lead to the ability to hook up raid cards at full bandwidth. With some fancy adapters and sweat/tears someone would be able to make a tiny little nas with insane amounts of storage. And since flash storage is supposed to cross the gb/$ of hdds those tiny nas devices will be all flash based. Imagine a 24-32tb sata or sas raid array with cpu and networking in the size of a WiFi router. Imagine having 5g or ax WiFi built in with a battery and being able to carry around a mobile nas that is actually fast. I love how fast tech seems to be advancing this last year compared to the previous few years.
So that’s what SAS is. With regards the cards not working, could it be due to needing a minimum amount of lanes, eg x4? Have you tried in an x86 to confirm they work? :)
I had the same issue with powering an external PSU as you, to deal with this all you need is a logic level mosfet, a couple of resistors and some wire. Use 5V from the Pi to turn on the mosfet, which in turn turns on the PSU.
-Thanks, wonderful content .... !!! -So, my dream is to assemble much cheaper and DIY a FreeNAS with raspberry and HDs. -Now with this working perfectly we can go to the Freenas staff and demand that we have an image for Raspberry ... !!! -With OpenMediaVault it was already possible, but now with these advances you can have a Freenas (I want the pluggins of frenas running). -You are evolving exactly as I needed the project, thank you ... !!!
@@farhanyousaf5616 haha! If you're near San Jose in California, Excess Solution is where I got them for $10 apiece. They're a massive Walmart-sized electronics surplus shop so it might take a bit of searching down aisles to find them but they still had some last time I was there. Unfortunately they are closing soon thanks to Amazon buying the property (after Google shut down Weirdstuff, and then the oldest one Halted closing more recently).
Its not a firmware issue, it is a PCIe lane issues. Some of those cards just won't work on 1 PCIe lane. Deal with the LSI cards all the time with Dell and also other RAID cards and i have tired them in 1x to 16x adapters and they just won't work. I offered him some cards that I do know work though. Would love to see what the Pi 4 can do now!
You said Dell LSI card's? To let them link up you need to disable a connection to the pci-e connector. Because the firmware searches for a dell mobo :( "The trick is just to physically disable the SMBus signal. It is composed of just two pins B5 (SMCLK, SMBus clock) and B6 (SMDAT, SMBus data). These two pins need to be covered by tape or nail polish. On the top side of the card, they are the 5th and 6th PCIe pins from the left."
Jeff, I think you maybe have just been unlucky with the LSI cards, some of my bits and pices have just arrived and I plugged in an LSI 9211-8i I had laying around in the drawer and got this: pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo lspci -v 00:00.0 PCI bridge: Broadcom Limited Device 2711 (rev 20) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 55 Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=0 I/O behind bridge: 00000000-00000fff Memory behind bridge: f8000000-f80fffff Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [ac] Express Root Port (Slot-), MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting Capabilities: [180] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0000 Rev=0 Len=028 Capabilities: [240] L1 PM Substates Kernel driver in use: pcieport 01:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 02) Subsystem: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] Flags: fast devsel I/O ports at [disabled] Memory at 6000c0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=16K] Memory at 600080000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=256K] [virtual] Expansion ROM at 600000000 [disabled] [size=512K] Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [68] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [d0] Vital Product Data Capabilities: [a8] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [c0] MSI-X: Enable- Count=15 Masked- Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting Capabilities: [138] Power Budgeting Capabilities: [150] Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Capabilities: [190] Alternative Routing-ID Interpretation (ARI) I'll let you know how I get on, I'm assuming I have to compile the LSI drivers into the kernel now.
Nice! Can you post your findings to this GitHub issue? pipci.jeffgeerling.com/cards_storage/ibm-servraid-br10i-lsi-sas3082e-r-sas-raid.html (or start a new one for that card in particular)
@@JeffGeerling You've actually motivated me to order a RockPro64, this device has a PCIEx4 potentially giving it much more potential: www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ it also seems someone has the LSI 9211-4i working on it: wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64_Hardware_Accessory_Compatibility#PCIe_devices I am going to have a look through their forums and see if I can find anything helpful that could help with the Pi.
My first thought on why SAS controller is not working, card hangs on SMB signals. Cover 5th and 6th PCI-Express pin with kapton tape. Next, I'd try some HBA first, like Dell H310.
You could use a SAS HBA. With the cores on a pi4, they might make reasonable ceph nodes, hey? Obviously not production ready or cost effective, but you could!
Those Server grade Raid Cards are very weird in their behavior. They often won't even work in "normal" PCs. If you get a SAS card which isn't build for a specific server it might work. But shouldn't it be possible to connect a Sata drive through the sd card slot. Converting from sd card to ide/sata is possible so the other way around could be as well with fpgas and external power.
Hi Jeff. What command you use to mesure the performance of your raid? I'm using a RockPro64 just like you're using. I want to compare with the RaspberryPi 4 to check if there's any difference. Thanks.
Omg Jeff keep me hanging. You know you can go over 10 min? 😁. Anyway how about you take this one further and actually mount the raspberry pi in a 24 drive server rack and have the Pi run all 24 drives. Heck I watched this video I probably will watch that one too! Thanks for your excellent content. One more suggestion. Make a video on how you compile the pi kernel. I am sure there are viewers that have never seen it done you could talk about all the options where to get the source code and all that lovely stuff.
these videos take so long to produce; I was originally planning on everything in one video, but I ended up having too much to be able to get it in one video this week. plus the streaming series starts Wed!
this is pretty cool. i understand doing it for the challenge and the satisfaction of accomplishment but in the end this would not be practical. if you have to resilver a drive on a pi that can take days depending on size of drive lost and computational power.
Interesting to see the initial plan was for hardware raid. Due to the more limited CPU resources on a pi? I've heard warnings against hw raid, mainly SMART monitoring being "broken" by the card hiding it, and when the card dies your disks are useless unless you have spare card of the same make/model.
It's definitely important to have your hardware raid monitoring properly configured. A lot of people kind of skimp on the configuration side of things and then, yeah, it gets hidden when certain things in the array fail until it's too late, it's 2 a.m. Monday morning and your entire system is going to need rebuilding.
sometimes there is problem that card is thinking x4 or x8 configuration of PCIe links and cannot run i x1 slot, but sometime you can force them use jaust one line (x1) by simle jumper - on PCIe is detection pin which configuration (links count) is usable. just shorten these pins for x1 configuration and voala!
Would REALLY like to see the SAS cards work on the Pi. Sad they didn't. Been struggling with SAS drives on a sever build recently and need to find an alternative way to interface with them.
Try covering PINs B5 (SMCLK, SMBus clock) an B6 (SMDAT, SMBus data) - This is a common thing to get OEM Storage/Raid cards to work in non-branded servers. You can use clear nail polish or some kapton tape.
One thing to nope, you don't need to use PCIe risers, you can cut out the plastic in the back of the PCIe slot on the pi and use that as an open ended slot. Open ended slots are found on both consumer and server grade motherboards from time to time. I presume you already know this but I'm just throwing it out there anyway
I'm definitely following this as I'm looking at an ultra low-power NAS/MMS I will be using Samsung SSDs as they use in reality about 2.5W which is diddly. The real question is Pi4 or J5040.
@@JeffGeerling I personally favour Samsung EVO. I'd love to know the power draw though. My target is 60W peak all in including screen keyboard and speakers etc.
Could it have been due to the SAS raid card trying to run it's BIOS on startup i.e. to setup the drives? As it's for AMD64 it wouldn't have been able to run on the Arm? There are some which run in HBA mode(i.e. don't handle the raid but let the OS have direct access to the disks, I've got one in my DL380e. Perhaps then it would then allow the PI to see the drives? In essence it would be the same as the card you ended up with but with the ability to add more than 4 drives in the future.
I think it should be possible to use the always on 5v output of the psu to power the raspberry pi and you could program it to be in a sleep state with the psu off or in a on state with a output the raspberry pi to turn on the psu... Maybe the whole thing could run off 5v always on depending how much power the hdd use
SanDisk extreme plus A2 rated MicroSD cards are pretty nice. It has a sequential write of only 40+ MB/sec but has decent IOPS and is really quick on small files. APT updates are quick like an SSD. I've found 64 GB A2 SanDisk cards on sale for less than $20.
AFIK, due to the fact that the RPI does not have a bios all the stuff that relay on bios initialization fails. GPUS, RaidCards (probably an hba would work). Isn't there a coreboot/seabios to boot win 10 for arm? Probably in that way you could solve a lot of problems.
Being HP branded, those LSI HBA cards might have some weird custom firmware flashed on them. You should try reflashing+updating them with the "IR" (raid) firmware, or if you want to go the ZFS on Linux route, the "IT" (jbod) firmware. IIRC, the channel, "The Art of Server" has some good content on flashing the cards.
If I had to guess the reason the LSI Raid cards aren't working it could well have something to do with their built-in BIOS/configuration tool which might just completely not work on an ARM system I don't know exactly how it works but I believe there is code on these cards which is used to initialise them with the BIOS but since that code is intented for an x86 system its not going to run on a pi, it might be possible to do something with emulation but in the end it would be more effort than it is worth
Yeah, that could definitely be the case-I've been hitting that same wall with the GPUs I'm testing. The weird thing is all other cards at least initialize so lspci can see them. These cards just act dead :/
@@JeffGeerling I think with GPUs because they are usually compliant with the old VGA standard they can be intialised like any old VGA card for basic initialisation (which is how the BIOS/UEFI can output to them before they are fully initialised), and the extra initialisation steps are just needed for anything outside of VGA. But I don't think RAID cards have anything like that. I could be completely wrong though, I am not an expert I just come across random info like this as I spend hours a day watching youtube vidoes and browsing twitter/reddit lol I think I remember a twitter thread from foone where they hooked an ISA slot to a microcontroller and were trying to initialise old video adaptors but I can't find it now, I think he had similar issues initialising the cards because he couldn't run the initialisation code on the cards without an x86 CPU
The sas connector on the LSi card doe not transfer 4 SATA connection, it transfer 4 sas connection for a total of 3gb/s (SAS 1) 6gb/s (SAS 2) or 12gb/s (SAS 3). the sas protocol can support sata device but calling this 4 lanes sata lanes is wrong as fas as i know. Sas drives also are better not only for the higher rotational speed (most of them ar 7200rpm as normal sata hdd) but for the extra connection pins that gives more feature usefull for datacenter or server in general. Not only exist SAS hdd but also SAS SSD and SAS NVME SSDs with the sata connector(owever for for nvme is more common the u.2 connector)
Technically true-but in the end I was using four SATA II drives (3 Gbps max) over a 1x PCIe lane (3.2 Gbps max), so to a Pi user at least, it's six of one, half-dozen of the other... I believe these cards are SAS 2, though since I was going into the 1x slot they would max out far before they hit the internal limit if I was doing something like copying data from network to drive, or between drives on PCIe bus.
@@JeffGeerling Tank you very much for the reply, i really like when youtubers reply to comments. It's all true, i was only specifyng for people like me that not only use raspberry but also servers and the explanation you gave in the video i think was very simplified and with some errors for the thypic use of the lsi card, for a raspberyy as you explained you cannot see the difference. This lsi cad however should work if you find a way to let it boot before the os, i don't have the knowledge to let it work but on server normally it work like this: -You power on the server, it check for all the hardware and then it boot the raid card and show the configuration and how to cunfigure it -After thet it recheck for all the divice and then boot to the os (or you can go in the bios/boot manager at this point) If you find a way to boot the card before the osyou will have better chance to make it work on a raspberry. The lsi card i have for example if i do not enable it on it's configuration at the boot i cannot see it on the desktop
It would be nice if there was a PI with a PCIe 8x slot available via breakout board or hat (bonus if this version had ECC memory). They would definitely sell a lot of them to people looking to make their own NAS servers or routers.
I believe in you. It sure would be nice for me to be able to take my x86_64 based server (running Ubuntu + ZFS on a mini-ITX board and an LSI SAS card like these) and switch it to a lower-power ARM architecture, but keep all the features.
This is interesting... The Pi doesn't POST like a normal x86 box so how would it load the option ROM and provide the POST configuration options to set up RAID?
They sell power/reset switches for these psus. I wonder if LED PSUs would work (probably not, as they don't have both 12 and 5V outputs; though a 12V to 5V buck converter is pretty cheap).
First of all thanks for your great vidz and output, also rock on with your hacking pi's/it's not meant but that's why I do it attitude. Second, SAS != RAID RAID != SAS SAS != SATA Meaning SAS is not equal to RAID or the other way around. Maybe as I'm so familiar with legacy/modern enterprise HW stuff, I wanted to point that out for others (as you've probably have a good crasp on it already). SAS (serial-attached-scsi) is modern serial SCSI as old legacy SCSI was parallel. SCSI is a protocol as is (P)ATA or (S)ATA. SAS controller can be either HBA without RAID or it might have RAID functionality. Even though majority probably are also raid controllers. Also not all SAS controllers talk ATA, there were few first gen SAS controllers which didn't have the support. Either it's embedded to the same SAS controller or the card also needs an ATA chip (this i'm unaware of but more likely it's the same). It's cheap to embed SATA but less so with SCSI. That's why majority of SAS cards support SATA, but not the other way around. Also they do not support both protocols simultaneously as I am aware of as I haven't worked with the newest stuff...
Love it when people can show their own mistakes without being ashamed.
That is why I like your trailers.
Well he is adorably nerdy 🤣
Mistakes are learning opportunities.
Real science tries to disprove it's self, that's how you can tell a real science from fake science. Global warming caused my man and CO2 is fake science. It's all cherry picked data there is no antithesis,
Yay! My new favorite channel. Another tinkering fool, just like me.
It's a good thing we don't shame him
I'm laughing with a dell R900 under my bed :))
But I can't even hear myself laughing tho...
😂
This made me laugh xD
HP DL380 G6 for me, but I feel your pain brother 🙏😭
I assume you use it to warm up the bed?
@@Vanplay92 and a good chunk of the house
ZFS or it didn't happen :)
This guy
You, I like you
Can you install OpenZFS on raspian?
Lol there’s no way ZFS is going to run on such constraints....at least not usably anyway
@@KienTran a 1GB Pi3 is more than enough to run basic storage ZFS without dedup or anything too fancy.
We run 8TB+ pools 1GB x86 boxes and have done for a couple of years without a single bit lost (sample size 300+ units, 6PB total)
The (old Atom 330) boards in use are constrained by 1 slot of RAM so the max installable is 2GB - but we cannot renew or upgrade the hardware as they are all deployed in very remote locations and run 24/7
True, they suffer from bottlenecking on intense random workloads but the boxes are fine for typical NAS use.
We also run 20 or more RasPi 3's on ZoL doing the same...
Brilliant, nothing like cobbling together a raid array from parts. I've been waiting for something like this for the Raspberry PI for ages,thanks for doing this.
I can't believe you're even trying this!
There's a reason people buy giant PC cases and mount all their hardware inside.
This is so dumb, why am I even watching this video?!
xd
:D
when you leave a dumb comment on your own video just to see how people will react to it
Wat
Maybe make a custom storage case for this kit, imagine the nice Pi board on top of it all?
My favourite part about this video is how honest it was about all the little "gotchas" that arose during the project. To me, that's where the value is --- learning about where things can go sideways, as opposed to watching a video where everything goes according to the plan. Thanks for sharing!
Things rarely go according to plan around these parts!
Having a 6TB SAS drive purchased by mistake a year ago still dusting, I was pondering this the other day, THIS is epicly timed Sir.
That's a pricey-and highly performant-mistake!
@@JeffGeerling Not so, hence the mistake as was £100 part in larger sale. But SAS card once I get around to it seemed good idea and did like the specs heat tollerance wise as had idea's of loft NAS. Still probably go with old x86 pc I have, though the RPi or arm based avenue would be my choice.
WHY oh why don't they make some SAS to USB3 adapter that are fair price, think found one and that was half a grand :(.
Certainly a market here for a fair priced one.
@@paulgray1318 Haha, true, I was digging around to find any way to get SAS without a SAS card and I found that adapter too, like $700!
Jeff, I love your videos! You have genuine content rather than rehashed stuff that 50 other people have published. I've done a lot of the same things you have...using mdadm, hacking microcontrollers, and building Pi projects. So its great to see you being so organized and sharing your findings with the world. And I love your bloopers at the end of the videos. Thanks!
Very interesting video. I would love to see a video on compiling the Pi Kernel for stuff like this. Thanks for being so informative. People like you are what make the Raspberry Pi community so wonderful.
I have a list of some of the 'accessory' videos that I would like to make, including how to compile / cross-compile the kernel, how to flash the eMMC on the CM4, etc. - it's just there isn't enough time in my day to get to all this :(
Maybe someday...
Me too!!! 🧐
00:49 - 🍌 for scale
Love your nerd talk....it has quickly shown me how much I have missed in the few years I have been off grid
I am a storage nutcase and I love that these crazy Raspi videos are a gateway drug to talk about other topics, such as SAS/SATA RAID/HBA cards.
I am not a storage nutcase anymore, but used to collect old hard drives and this project brings back memories!
Makes me want to see if my giant old external SCSI Mac drive still spins up!
Your videos are getting better, seems like you are having fun making them.
You always do the most RAIDICULOUS projects with your Raspberry Pis!
Oh you...
@@JeffGeerling I try... and am trying. Very trying.
off topic,the Silverstone CP11 SATA cables are really nice and easy to manage, but yeah, SAS working would have been nicer
Ooh nice, I'd never seen those before.
@@JeffGeerling they're slightly more pricey than standard SATA cables, but as long as I have to keep using SATA cables, I'll be using CP-11s
Yea I had to get some as they were the only ones that would fit under my gpu, the price is "special".
"...four SATA cards. Four SATA cards?" Dat face. Hilarious. Excellent work, sir, much enjoyment and appreciation of your work being had here.
You must read my mind Jeff! Every time I think of a project, within a day or two, you release a video on it!
For those thinking "go with a server": Server fans have a tendency to sound like vacuum cleaners. I have a HP Proliant that sounds like 3 carpet shampooers and that's normal for the model, not fan malfunction. Using 32 sticks of RAM, 4 CPU's, 8 HDD's, 11 expansion cards, and 2 power supplies, it can generate too much heat for a quiet set of fans.
HP Proliant DL585 G2 server, BTW.
I am hoping with the rise in popularity ARM that more quiet and power efficient servers become available. Right now there aren't many choices still for ARM servers for sale.
In the meantime, Supermicro makes some embedded servers that run on Intel Atom with passive cooling. I used to have one for my home lab but it had the infamous C2000 clock signal death and doesn't boot anymore. The newest generation of Atom processors (C3000) do not have this defect AFAIK. There are also the EPYC 3000 and Xeon-D choices in the embedded options but I don't know how those are in heat and noise.
yes servers are loud but I'm not going to wait days to resilver a drive on a pi when it takes minutes on my server.
7:36 Scary one - for a moment, I thought it read "SMR"
r/datahoarder leaking!
@@JeffGeerling , get the tape!
Or move out the way, Tape Master needs room.
I did this but with a rockpro64, an LSI 9211-4i HBA, 4x SAS 4TB drives, all in a 1U server chassis with hot swap bays. The rockpro64 has a 4x PCIE port and it all works together nicely running on Armbian OS and openZFS.
This is something I have been waiting for a loooong time! Now we can build Linux NAS drive with pico PSU.
I used to think you were really smart. Maybe even "perfect". Then I started thinking: you always see bloopers for your videos but Red Shirt Jeff never seems to have bloopers. Maybe Red Shirt Jeff is smarter and never makes mistakes? I wonder if someday he will start making your videos for you!! HAHAHA
I would love for there to be a MiniITX form factor "motherboard" that you could slot a pi 4 computer module into instead of a CPU and RAM, would be interesting/cool and handy for some projects
Alas I do not have the schematic/board layout knowledge to do something like that myself
I've considered working on this, if for no other reason than I've had a few close calls with the crazy contraptions I've been putting together on my desk.
Turing pi 2 Will do this no?
Also check out github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/issues/19
I think Level 1 Tech did a B550M motherboard recently that looked good for something like this.
Sounds like you want a 4x stack of Pi 400's with duck tape around them
This is what I've been long waiting for to make on Raspi. Gonna save this to my video list. Thank you Jeff.
This is such a great idea! it's much better than this old Lenovo Thinkserver with a chassis, 600W power supply, Xeon processor and 12GB of memory that I bought from my local e-waste recycling center for $35. I think once you've perfected this amazing solution I suggest you try it on a Samsung smart refrigerator. Then you'd have integrated cooling as well. In the icebox.
BTW. You can boot Rasberry Pi using UEFI, and load something like generic Debian, Ubuntu or Centos images and kernels. They are usually for arm64 servers that have UEFI (often called ServerReady in ARM speak, now ARM SystemReady SR), but with RPi4 firmware from pftf repo, it just works. These kernel usually have almost all modules compiled in as modules, so no need to recompile the kernel. Usually you will have access to all same modules as on x86 kernel on these distros (minus some x86 specific stuff, like some motherboard sensors, some ISA sounds drivers, etc), but almost all PCI / PCIe stuff (including hard drive controllers, raid cards, network cards, wifi, audio and video related cards, GPUs, etc) will be there.
Anyway great video. I love experiments like that myself. As of the not-working RAID card, it is probably related to bios on these cards. They often need to initialize at boot, and their bios is often x86 only. Not all of them tho. Some of them can be initialized by linux drivers and firmware loaded by Linux. More investigation is required definitively.
Also you do not need explain or apologize for your ideas, that some will consider silly. There is plenty of uses for a setup like this, and even if there is none, it is still fun, and you can learn many things from it.
Your joyous demeanor and terrible humor is delightful. Thank you for doing ridiculous stuff like this and sharing it in such a pleasant way
Thank you for doing this! I was expecting to see SAS on RPi. :D
It could still happen... might just have two dud cards, don't have a PC to test them in right now :/
From memory, I think some Dell RAID controllers are tied to a Dell RAID key which sits on the motherboard. I think I have one on my Desk somewhere.
Nice video Jeff. Well done. can't wait to see the rest.
Jeff, you are the best!
The video is so ironic and fascinating at the same time :)
Linus Tech Tips should hire this man and throw some money at a regular Raspberry Pi show.
Just a quick tip, I’ve noticed that the performance is much better when using XFS for the disks instead of EXT4
better yet ZFS
You’re such a boss man! Love this channel.
Why can I only give you one thumbs up? You deserve more!
I gave you a thumbs up, so now there's two.
Great videos Jeff, keep them coming!
The PCI slot for RPI is just what I have been waiting for, for a "one node - one disk" CEPH storage, though just having a SATA port directly on the PI would be so much easier.
Jeff, eres un fenómeno y un fuera de serie. Buen video.
You can use the psu 12v for rp4 but needs more converting cables or cut the jack entirely
Buying a 3 pack so you have a single spare??? You need to buy in bulk and order 20 extras, you know you are going to need them ! Great video as always I just did this same project but on my R730xd so it will support 44 drives. The lsi controllers with the firmware mod are fantastic. 10tb sas drives are 99 bucks now!
That would be, "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched." It's easy to count the eggs, as eggs are eggs! :-)
This is such an interesting concept for me, I really look forward to the next video. I have a couple projects I dont need a large server for so this is really intriguing for me, thank you!
Don't you have to flash those cards in IT mode to get them working without a traditional bios?
mdadm is pretty sweet. My main NAS died and I moved the array to a backup machine. I have hot swappable drives and I put them in one at a time while tail-ing syslog. I watched each of the 9 drives get detected and when the last one went in I saw a msg from mdadm that said "hey I see an array here, you're all set!" Super painless and I didn't lose my 56TB of data!
Sometimes simple is best. And I like mdadm because it's (relatively) simple.
Need 10 hour loop of that HDD ASMR now... or maybe just put a server under my bed.
@Pașca Alexandru has you covered!
Underbed heating?
Dont forget that SAS drives are dual ported, meaning they can be connected to 2 controllers at the same time for redundancy.
Hi Jeff, interesting video. I wanted some network Pi based storage that I could store my files on and stream videos / music via Samba. I opted for OMV, 4x SSD, 4xUSB3 to SSD cables, a vertical USB3 powered hub, a single metal vertical SSD enclosure to store the 4xSSDs all screwed in. All told less than 10w electricity consumption for both Pi 4 2GB and USB hub together. I definitely did not want a fan running 24x365 for both power consumption and noise reasons. Everything stores on a small bookcase shelf. Sure SSDs are more expensive but I am happy with my 3.2 TB of network storage that I can upgrade at any time as SSDs become cheaper. Your choice of kit will kill mine anyday and I look forward to your next video.
Hey, if it works, it works! Just make sure you have backups (rclone to Amazon Glacier is my basic weapon of choice these days).
My primary NAS that I use for video storage right now is a janky old Mac mini with four 2TB SSDs that I paid a few arms and legs for last year (used to be a couple giant HDDs but those things were noisy and slow to spin up).
Thanks Jeff! Totally agree about backups.
When new raspberry pi and other sbc models start coming out in the next year or two, if they have pcie 4.0 nvme support that will lead to the ability to hook up raid cards at full bandwidth. With some fancy adapters and sweat/tears someone would be able to make a tiny little nas with insane amounts of storage. And since flash storage is supposed to cross the gb/$ of hdds those tiny nas devices will be all flash based. Imagine a 24-32tb sata or sas raid array with cpu and networking in the size of a WiFi router. Imagine having 5g or ax WiFi built in with a battery and being able to carry around a mobile nas that is actually fast. I love how fast tech seems to be advancing this last year compared to the previous few years.
So that’s what SAS is.
With regards the cards not working, could it be due to needing a minimum amount of lanes, eg x4?
Have you tried in an x86 to confirm they work? :)
Have a closer look at the DC blocking capacitors on the PCI-E cards. It’s not uncommon to find these sheared off as a result of careless handing.
Would not building the marvell sata controller as seeprate module work? Does one really need to build whole kernel for raspberrypi?
Cause it would, but the guy is a noob !
I had the same issue with powering an external PSU as you, to deal with this all you need is a logic level mosfet, a couple of resistors and some wire.
Use 5V from the Pi to turn on the mosfet, which in turn turns on the PSU.
Jeff, most LSI cards do require PCIe x8 or they won’t even boot. In some rare cases x4 does work but it depends on the board.
-Thanks, wonderful content .... !!!
-So, my dream is to assemble much cheaper and DIY a FreeNAS with raspberry and HDs.
-Now with this working perfectly we can go to the Freenas staff and demand that we have an image for Raspberry ... !!!
-With OpenMediaVault it was already possible, but now with these advances you can have a Freenas (I want the pluggins of frenas running).
-You are evolving exactly as I needed the project, thank you ... !!!
Been wanting to do something like this for some time. Have a bunch of Addonics 5-drive SAS/SATA enclosures and loads of various SAS controllers.
If you want to donate any... I'd love to help out. :)
@@farhanyousaf5616 haha! If you're near San Jose in California, Excess Solution is where I got them for $10 apiece. They're a massive Walmart-sized electronics surplus shop so it might take a bit of searching down aisles to find them but they still had some last time I was there. Unfortunately they are closing soon thanks to Amazon buying the property (after Google shut down Weirdstuff, and then the oldest one Halted closing more recently).
@@rbus I've been to Weird Stuff. Was so sad to see them shutdown... :(
excited for the next Video!
I wonder if you could flash the LSI cards into HBA mode and use them that way
Its not a firmware issue, it is a PCIe lane issues. Some of those cards just won't work on 1 PCIe lane. Deal with the LSI cards all the time with Dell and also other RAID cards and i have tired them in 1x to 16x adapters and they just won't work. I offered him some cards that I do know work though. Would love to see what the Pi 4 can do now!
@@drtweak87 ah right, that makes sense. I have also tried pcie risers with adaptec and lsi cards, with mixed results
You said Dell LSI card's? To let them link up you need to disable a connection to the pci-e connector. Because the firmware searches for a dell mobo :( "The trick is just to physically disable the SMBus signal. It is composed of just two pins B5 (SMCLK, SMBus clock) and B6 (SMDAT, SMBus data). These two pins need to be covered by tape or nail polish. On the top side of the card, they are the 5th and 6th PCIe pins from the left."
Nice vid. Fun as always
Now a need a new LSI HBA and a SAS Expander. Hope it will be compatible soon. Many thanks for the vid.
Jeff, I think you maybe have just been unlucky with the LSI cards, some of my bits and pices have just arrived and I plugged in an LSI 9211-8i I had laying around in the drawer and got this:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo lspci -v
00:00.0 PCI bridge: Broadcom Limited Device 2711 (rev 20) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 55
Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=0
I/O behind bridge: 00000000-00000fff
Memory behind bridge: f8000000-f80fffff
Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [ac] Express Root Port (Slot-), MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [180] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0000 Rev=0 Len=028
Capabilities: [240] L1 PM Substates
Kernel driver in use: pcieport
01:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 02)
Subsystem: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon]
Flags: fast devsel
I/O ports at [disabled]
Memory at 6000c0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=16K]
Memory at 600080000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=256K]
[virtual] Expansion ROM at 600000000 [disabled] [size=512K]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [68] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [d0] Vital Product Data
Capabilities: [a8] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [c0] MSI-X: Enable- Count=15 Masked-
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [138] Power Budgeting
Capabilities: [150] Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV)
Capabilities: [190] Alternative Routing-ID Interpretation (ARI)
I'll let you know how I get on, I'm assuming I have to compile the LSI drivers into the kernel now.
PS, this device will be in IT mode already from its days in a ZFS server.
Nice! Can you post your findings to this GitHub issue? pipci.jeffgeerling.com/cards_storage/ibm-servraid-br10i-lsi-sas3082e-r-sas-raid.html (or start a new one for that card in particular)
@@JeffGeerling You've actually motivated me to order a RockPro64, this device has a PCIEx4 potentially giving it much more potential: www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ it also seems someone has the LSI 9211-4i working on it: wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64_Hardware_Accessory_Compatibility#PCIe_devices I am going to have a look through their forums and see if I can find anything helpful that could help with the Pi.
My first thought on why SAS controller is not working, card hangs on SMB signals. Cover 5th and 6th PCI-Express pin with kapton tape. Next, I'd try some HBA first, like Dell H310.
I tried the tape trick and it didn't help. I'm thinking the cards may need BIOS /initialization I can't currently provide.
You could use a SAS HBA. With the cores on a pi4, they might make reasonable ceph nodes, hey? Obviously not production ready or cost effective, but you could!
Those Server grade Raid Cards are very weird in their behavior. They often won't even work in "normal" PCs. If you get a SAS card which isn't build for a specific server it might work. But shouldn't it be possible to connect a Sata drive through the sd card slot. Converting from sd card to ide/sata is possible so the other way around could be as well with fpgas and external power.
Wow...
Now that's an idea worth trying..!
I hope Jeff takes up the challenge...
I love these bloopers !!
Hi Jeff. What command you use to mesure the performance of your raid? I'm using a RockPro64 just like you're using. I want to compare with the RaspberryPi 4 to check if there's any difference. Thanks.
Bro, You are already breaking every limits of raspberry pi....
Love your work bro...❤️
Omg Jeff keep me hanging. You know you can go over 10 min? 😁. Anyway how about you take this one further and actually mount the raspberry pi in a 24 drive server rack and have the Pi run all 24 drives. Heck I watched this video I probably will watch that one too! Thanks for your excellent content.
One more suggestion. Make a video on how you compile the pi kernel. I am sure there are viewers that have never seen it done you could talk about all the options where to get the source code and all that lovely stuff.
these videos take so long to produce; I was originally planning on everything in one video, but I ended up having too much to be able to get it in one video this week. plus the streaming series starts Wed!
I literally laughed out loud when you said what I was thinking, “...but wait, there’s still time left in this video...” lol
this is pretty cool. i understand doing it for the challenge and the satisfaction of accomplishment but in the end this would not be practical. if you have to resilver a drive on a pi that can take days depending on size of drive lost and computational power.
Interesting to see the initial plan was for hardware raid. Due to the more limited CPU resources on a pi?
I've heard warnings against hw raid, mainly SMART monitoring being "broken" by the card hiding it, and when the card dies your disks are useless unless you have spare card of the same make/model.
It's definitely important to have your hardware raid monitoring properly configured. A lot of people kind of skimp on the configuration side of things and then, yeah, it gets hidden when certain things in the array fail until it's too late, it's 2 a.m. Monday morning and your entire system is going to need rebuilding.
I'm only guessing, but most SAS cards have bios for management, could it be that it's required to run for it to boot the card?
That could definitely be the case :(
sometimes there is problem that card is thinking x4 or x8 configuration of PCIe links and cannot run i x1 slot, but sometime you can force them use jaust one line (x1) by simle jumper - on PCIe is detection pin which configuration (links count) is usable. just shorten these pins for x1 configuration and voala!
Would REALLY like to see the SAS cards work on the Pi. Sad they didn't. Been struggling with SAS drives on a sever build recently and need to find an alternative way to interface with them.
Try covering PINs B5 (SMCLK, SMBus clock) an B6 (SMDAT, SMBus data)
- This is a common thing to get OEM Storage/Raid cards to work in non-branded servers. You can use clear nail polish or some kapton tape.
One thing to nope, you don't need to use PCIe risers, you can cut out the plastic in the back of the PCIe slot on the pi and use that as an open ended slot. Open ended slots are found on both consumer and server grade motherboards from time to time. I presume you already know this but I'm just throwing it out there anyway
I use a rpi 4 for my home brewed NAS, works great!
Me too ! Much lower power consumption.
aw, no 15k sas drive? looking forward to the next iteration of "why not!"
I'm definitely following this as I'm looking at an ultra low-power NAS/MMS I will be using Samsung SSDs as they use in reality about 2.5W which is diddly. The real question is Pi4 or J5040.
I'm going to start testing with some Kingston SSDs as well.
@@JeffGeerling I personally favour Samsung EVO. I'd love to know the power draw though. My target is 60W peak all in including screen keyboard and speakers etc.
@@gordonlawrence1448 It seems like the Kingston SSDs I'm testing each use 5W peak, and the Pi/IO Board itself 5-10W max.
@@JeffGeerling I'm going to have to take a better look at this. Thanks for the info.
Great, I have to try!
This is so awesome. I was wondering about this very thing 😀
Could it have been due to the SAS raid card trying to run it's BIOS on startup i.e. to setup the drives?
As it's for AMD64 it wouldn't have been able to run on the Arm?
There are some which run in HBA mode(i.e. don't handle the raid but let the OS have direct access to the disks, I've got one in my DL380e. Perhaps then it would then allow the PI to see the drives?
In essence it would be the same as the card you ended up with but with the ability to add more than 4 drives in the future.
I think it should be possible to use the always on 5v output of the psu to power the raspberry pi and you could program it to be in a sleep state with the psu off or in a on state with a output the raspberry pi to turn on the psu... Maybe the whole thing could run off 5v always on depending how much power the hdd use
I wonder if you can use the poe hat and the usb c power port to power the pi at the same time for devices with high power draw
I wonder what RAID type you’ll create. I’m hoping 1+0.
RAID 0 is so fast, and so stripey.
But anything besides RAID 10 and it feels like I should be playing the clip "Do you feel lucky, punk?"
@@JeffGeerling what about raid 5? it would overload the PI cpu during write though, or would it?
RAID-Z-something, because on anything else your data is just on an ephemeral /tmp with /dev/random appended in occasionally
can i ask you a question?
where do you get the money to buy everything you showcased every single video?
As someone who works on PC hardware for a living, it always blows my mind when I see people actually pay money for SATA cables.
SanDisk extreme plus A2 rated MicroSD cards are pretty nice. It has a sequential write of only 40+ MB/sec but has decent IOPS and is really quick on small files. APT updates are quick like an SSD. I've found 64 GB A2 SanDisk cards on sale for less than $20.
AFIK, due to the fact that the RPI does not have a bios all the stuff that relay on bios initialization fails.
GPUS, RaidCards (probably an hba would work). Isn't there a coreboot/seabios to boot win 10 for arm? Probably in that way you could solve a lot of problems.
Being HP branded, those LSI HBA cards might have some weird custom firmware flashed on them. You should try reflashing+updating them with the "IR" (raid) firmware, or if you want to go the ZFS on Linux route, the "IT" (jbod) firmware. IIRC, the channel, "The Art of Server" has some good content on flashing the cards.
...err, the FreeNAS/TrueNAS community should also be a big help here.
Out of curiosity, what was the cost of this build?
If I had to guess the reason the LSI Raid cards aren't working it could well have something to do with their built-in BIOS/configuration tool which might just completely not work on an ARM system
I don't know exactly how it works but I believe there is code on these cards which is used to initialise them with the BIOS but since that code is intented for an x86 system its not going to run on a pi, it might be possible to do something with emulation but in the end it would be more effort than it is worth
Yeah, that could definitely be the case-I've been hitting that same wall with the GPUs I'm testing. The weird thing is all other cards at least initialize so lspci can see them. These cards just act dead :/
@@JeffGeerling I think with GPUs because they are usually compliant with the old VGA standard they can be intialised like any old VGA card for basic initialisation (which is how the BIOS/UEFI can output to them before they are fully initialised), and the extra initialisation steps are just needed for anything outside of VGA. But I don't think RAID cards have anything like that.
I could be completely wrong though, I am not an expert I just come across random info like this as I spend hours a day watching youtube vidoes and browsing twitter/reddit lol
I think I remember a twitter thread from foone where they hooked an ISA slot to a microcontroller and were trying to initialise old video adaptors but I can't find it now, I think he had similar issues initialising the cards because he couldn't run the initialisation code on the cards without an x86 CPU
The sas connector on the LSi card doe not transfer 4 SATA connection, it transfer 4 sas connection for a total of 3gb/s (SAS 1) 6gb/s (SAS 2) or 12gb/s (SAS 3). the sas protocol can support sata device but calling this 4 lanes sata lanes is wrong as fas as i know.
Sas drives also are better not only for the higher rotational speed (most of them ar 7200rpm as normal sata hdd) but for the extra connection pins that gives more feature usefull for datacenter or server in general.
Not only exist SAS hdd but also SAS SSD and SAS NVME SSDs with the sata connector(owever for for nvme is more common the u.2 connector)
Technically true-but in the end I was using four SATA II drives (3 Gbps max) over a 1x PCIe lane (3.2 Gbps max), so to a Pi user at least, it's six of one, half-dozen of the other...
I believe these cards are SAS 2, though since I was going into the 1x slot they would max out far before they hit the internal limit if I was doing something like copying data from network to drive, or between drives on PCIe bus.
@@JeffGeerling Tank you very much for the reply, i really like when youtubers reply to comments.
It's all true, i was only specifyng for people like me that not only use raspberry but also servers and the explanation you gave in the video i think was very simplified and with some errors for the thypic use of the lsi card, for a raspberyy as you explained you cannot see the difference.
This lsi cad however should work if you find a way to let it boot before the os, i don't have the knowledge to let it work but on server normally it work like this:
-You power on the server, it check for all the hardware and then it boot the raid card and show the configuration and how to cunfigure it
-After thet it recheck for all the divice and then boot to the os (or you can go in the bios/boot manager at this point)
If you find a way to boot the card before the osyou will have better chance to make it work on a raspberry. The lsi card i have for example if i do not enable it on it's configuration at the boot i cannot see it on the desktop
Its not about why! Its about IF YOU CAN! That's what makes people like us love SBCs!!
It would be nice if there was a PI with a PCIe 8x slot available via breakout board or hat (bonus if this version had ECC memory). They would definitely sell a lot of them to people looking to make their own NAS servers or routers.
I believe in you. It sure would be nice for me to be able to take my x86_64 based server (running Ubuntu + ZFS on a mini-ITX board and an LSI SAS card like these) and switch it to a lower-power ARM architecture, but keep all the features.
This is interesting... The Pi doesn't POST like a normal x86 box so how would it load the option ROM and provide the POST configuration options to set up RAID?
Also, I love your videos. They're excellent.
They sell power/reset switches for these psus.
I wonder if LED PSUs would work (probably not, as they don't have both 12 and 5V outputs; though a 12V to 5V buck converter is pretty cheap).
I am not really a Raspberry Pi fan anymore. But these videos are great!
First of all thanks for your great vidz and output, also rock on with your hacking pi's/it's not meant but that's why I do it attitude.
Second,
SAS != RAID
RAID != SAS
SAS != SATA
Meaning SAS is not equal to RAID or the other way around.
Maybe as I'm so familiar with legacy/modern enterprise HW stuff, I wanted to point that out for others (as you've probably have a good crasp on it already).
SAS (serial-attached-scsi) is modern serial SCSI as old legacy SCSI was parallel. SCSI is a protocol as is (P)ATA or (S)ATA. SAS controller can be either HBA without RAID or it might have RAID functionality. Even though majority probably are also raid controllers.
Also not all SAS controllers talk ATA, there were few first gen SAS controllers which didn't have the support. Either it's embedded to the same SAS controller or the card also needs an ATA chip (this i'm unaware of but more likely it's the same). It's cheap to embed SATA but less so with SCSI. That's why majority of SAS cards support SATA, but not the other way around. Also they do not support both protocols simultaneously as I am aware of as I haven't worked with the newest stuff...