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Current Motherboard is an Asus P9D-C/4L which has a PIKE card slot to allow for the expansion and additional use of 8 additional SAS/SATA ports. I've never used or even hard of a PIKE card until using this particular motherboard. I'm assuming its an ASUS only thing.

Anyhow, there are a few card options, of which the price varies greatly. Anyone here used them or can tell me what models are worth looking at? The most common being a PIKE 2008 (model not year). Then there is a 2108, and perhaps a few others but those 2 being the most common.

SAS or SATA? This question is more note worthy when mentioning a specific drive. The Seagate Constellation ES.3 1TB comes in either interface. Considering the rotational speed is 7200 of both, I'd assume they are the same physical drive with a different interface, nothing special. The office with this server only has maybe 10 machines hooked up to it, so the benefits of SAS would probably be wasted I'd imagine. Since this controller allows either SAS or SATA drives to be hooked up to it, its nice to know its an option. But for about $20 more per drive it seems like a waste, unless they were true SAS drives (lower capacity too) at 10K+ RPM.

IMO you're asking for pain years down the road. What if that proprietary card breaks and you can't find another?

Yes, the PIKE cards are an Asus thing. It stands for "Proprietary I/O Kit Expansion".

We have an Asus KCMA-D8 with a PIKE 2008 card in it here at work. We've been running a bunch of WD Blacks in RAID-6 on it for a couple of years without any problems.

On your SATA vs. SAS question, yeah if it is the same series of drive there probably isn't much difference in raw performance. Even if those SAS drives are 12 Gbit SAS, the two PIKE cards you mentioned are limited to 6 Gbit so there isn't an advantage in burst transfer speed. There may be some advantages to SAS in the area of management and reporting/logging (not sure), since SAS implements a full SCSI command set. Something else to consider is whether you've got any other systems that use SAS. If the server or PIKE card dies unexpectedly, do you have another way of getting data off of SAS drives?

bthylafh wrote:

IMO you're asking for pain years down the road. What if that proprietary card breaks and you can't find another?

Presumably you could replace it with a standard PCIe controller card in a pinch, assuming your PCIe slots aren't all occupied. But yeah, finding a drop-in replacement could be problematic if Asus EOLs it.

On an interesting side note, according to this thread the PIKE slot is actually just a PCIe x4 slot with a x8 connector, which is flipped around 180 degrees relative to how PCIe slots are normally oriented!

The PIKE slot always get four PCIe lanes to it. The catch is that this bandwidth could come at the expense of bandwidth to another slot. Something that you'll need to consult the motherboard manual on.

The main benefit of the PIKE controllers is that it can save a slot in some instances and works in 1U cases. Also the PIKE controllers seem to be cheaper.

just brew it! wrote:

But yeah, finding a drop-in replacement could be problematic if Asus EOLs it.

Same could be said about any hardware raid card however. There have been a few times where I have tried to replace a couple of LSI and Adaptec controllers only to be thwarted because the replacement card was a newer revision.

the wrote:

The main benefit of the PIKE controllers is that it can save a slot in some instances and works in 1U cases. Also the PIKE controllers seem to be cheaper.

In our case the 1U form factor didn't matter as it was a 3U enclosure. Our goal was to build a fairly beefy Linux server (12 cores, 64 GB registered ECC RAM, hot-swap RAID-6 disk array) on the cheap; the PIKE card was one piece of the puzzle that enabled us to succeed at doing so.

Yep the drives are identical from what I can tell minus the controller, so no point in going SAS. You also mentioned a point I considered. At present I don't have any SAS systems to hook them up in the event I had to do data recovery. While I agree that something this niche would be hard to find replacement in case of future failures, I'd also argue the same for other controllers including decent on motherboard options... have really damn good backups is all I can say. Thanks guys, good to hear someone else is using these.

I went with 6 of those es.3 and going to run RAID 1 for the OS and RAID 6 for the data. It's also my understanding that the 2008 Is limited to 2 logical disks of varing types. However one person per son reported it disallowing them to use the on board RAID once the PIKE was installed, like it takes priority. I'll report back if anyone is interested.

Welch wrote:

Yep the drives are identical from what I can tell minus the controller, so no point in going SAS.

Well... they'll have different firmware, at least. There may be some performance differences due to that, but unless you can find some benchmarks comparing the two it is probably impossible to say.

Welch wrote:

I went with 6 of those es.3 and going to run RAID 1 for the OS and RAID 6 for the data. It's also my understanding that the 2008 Is limited to 2 logical disks of varing types.

We're essentially using it as a bunch of "dumb" SATA ports, and running software RAID on it. So no limitations on logical volumes from the controller. The server is so ridiculously overpowered for the load on it (the use case shifted a bit after we had planned it out) that I doubt anybody is noticing a performance hit from the software RAID. This also eliminates the "how do we recover the RAID set if the controller dies" issue.

Welch wrote:

However one person per son reported it disallowing them to use the on board RAID once the PIKE was installed, like it takes priority. I'll report back if anyone is interested.

I actually don't recall for certain whether we're using the motherboard and PIKE ports at the same time. IIRC we're not.

Correction on my part, not RAID 6 but RAID 10. The PIKE card does not do RAID 6 from the document in I looked at. Also RAID 10 should alleviate weaknesses that 5 has. I'm not concerned about space, even 500 GB total would be more than they need.

Going to run 16gb RAM with an E3-1240v3 Xeon, way overkill for their uses but gives them room to grow.