I have two 6TB Dell EMC Exos 7E8 SAS hard drives that I would like to use with Zorin 18.1.
But I need a SAS Controller card. How can I check if hardware is supported by Zorin?
As an example, would the following work with Zorin?
I don't need to setup any form of RAID.
SAS HBA Card Compatible with LSI 9211-4i IT Mode PCIe SATA Expansion Card, Expander Support, 4-Port 6Gbs PCIe 2.0, HBA Controller with 1x SFF-8087 to 4X 8482 SAS Cable for NAS TrueNAS unRAID
I had two 6 TB SAS hard drives. Both appeared to be new (sealed in static bags).
One works and the other was not seen. Since they are identical models, I believe one hard drive is bad and this issue is likely not the fault of the SAS Controller card.
With the unfortunate exception of this one hard drive the SAS controller card and the other SAS hard drive worked beautifully. Plug n Play. I only needed to format the hard drive and start using it.
Note: I believe this SAS controller card cannot do any kind of RAID. For my needs this is fine.
For this kind of card, I would check the controller chipset more than the shop listing. A real LSI 9211-4i / SAS2008 card in IT mode is normally boring on Linux and should bind to the mpt2sas driver, so Zorin should see the disks as normal block devices, not as a hardware RAID volume.
If you can test before committing data to it, boot Zorin and run: lspci -nnk | grep -A3 -i sas
then check dmesg | grep -iE 'mpt|sas|scsi'. You want to see the controller detected and the driver in use. Also double-check the cable side: SFF-8087 to SAS drive connectors plus power for the disks. Cheap “LSI compatible” cards can vary, so I’d avoid anything where the exact chipset/firmware is unclear.
