Any recommendations for a HBA that is supported by ESXi 8 as well? Affordable would be nice

Networking & Firewalls
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I’m planning to upgrade my PC that is running ESXi 8 with an actual HBA card.

Currently only running 2x 16TB drives in a mirror with Truenas scale (virtualized, yeah I know bad idea but honestly been very good to me aside from the non existing snapshots or actual true passthrough and power management).

So the HBA needs to be able to connect to regular SATA interfaces internally.

Obviously I’m not looking for 500 euro cards here… I’m looking for a somewhat offordable sollution just for my homelab.

Thanks in adavance!

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I highly recommend reading this article from ServeTheHome.

Personally, I’m using an LSI 9207-8i from ebay for a few years now and never had any issues with it. I have passed it through to a VM on Proxmox running TrueNAS core, with 8x8TB WD red CMR drives.

After a quick search on ebay I found an offer from a seller in the US for less than $40: LSI 9207-8i SATA/SAS 6Gb/s PCI-E 3.0 FW:P20 IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID US | eBay

Here’s one from China, including SAS->SATA Breakout cables: LSI 9207-8i 6Gbs SAS HBA P20 IT Mode For ZFS FreeNAS unRAID +2* 8087 SATA Cable | eBay

1 Like
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Cheers!! :+1:

I’m not in the US but that doesn’t matter… I’ll probably order one of those on e-bay

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I own a few LSI 9207-8i cards myself and they are solid. I used them for a 3 node all flash VMware VSAN lab and got solid performance.

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Yeh I ordered one on e-bay… Should be arriving before the end of the month…

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My LSI 9207-8i arrived today… Installed it, reconfigured Truenas in ESXi… Pool was recognized and imported immediately… No apparent issues so far.

Question about this (or any HBA)… Some mod the card to add extra cooling… Should I be worried about not extra cooling this in a well spaced, pretty decently air cooled full tower case?

@ request: perhaps someone could move this thread to the appropriate channel… server hadware ?

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I would say no, you should be fine with the card as is.

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Yeah these cards tend to get pretty hot. However, I think that in a tower case with sufficient airflow you should not run into any problems. Mine has been running trouble-free 24/7, for years, and still is, without an extra fan.

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Mine are running in 1U Dell R630s without any issues for a few years now too.