Do I need a HBA and are all HBAs compatible with HEXOS

[Uncontrolled Competence]

I am new to this and i have known for a while that i need a NAS but i have never really understood the reason for a HBA. I Have 5 drives that i will put in a RAID and my mother board has  6 SATA connections so do i need a HBA? and if so why?

Any Help is much appreciated. 

[ysuissa]

generally HBA is just "an interface" to connect your HDDs to your CPU. assuming you're using a consumer-grade PC (rather than a server), the sata ports connect to your chipset (a chip that is built in to your motherboard), which does the job a HBA would've done.

hypothetically, lets say you use all 6 sata ports and wanna add more drives? only THEN would you need to get a HBA/RAID card, and allocate it in a PCIE slot

Edited December 4, 2024 by ysuissa

[Uncontrolled Competence]

Thanks for clearing that up @ysuissa. Your help is much appreciated.

[CptX4vier]

Just to add to this. I am using a LSI HBA card in IT mode and it is working. The reason I use a HBA card is that on some motherboards, when you install drives into the M.2 slot it turns off some of your onboard sata ports.

[Uncontrolled Competence]

Thanks for the info because the boot device that hexos is going to be installed on is a ssd with bulk storage on the HDDs so I'll check if I can still use 5 drives with that config.

[ysuissa]

4 hours ago, Uncontrolled Competence said:

Thanks for the info because the boot device that hexos is going to be installed on is a ssd with bulk storage on the HDDs so I'll check if I can still use 5 drives with that config.

You probably can, just be careful not to add the boot drive to one of the pools. I don't know if that's even possible (I would assume not), but I'd double check before formatting any drive.

It's "user friendly" but still very much in beta

[SRE4Life]

Motherboard manual will be your friend here. Will let you know if any M.2 slot disables a SATA port.