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I purchased an HP Z620 recently. It came with one Xeon CPU, 32GB of RAM, and an LSI SAS 9212-4i controller. I'm planning to install Windows 10 on a typical SSD drive (non-NVMe).

This machine has 6 SATA ports (2 @ 6Gb/s and 4 @ 3Gb/s) on the mainboard. I assume the previous user needed something more, hence the extra LSI controller. And from what I can see, the previous configuration was that the hard drives were all connected to the LSI card and not the ports on the motherboard.

I have limited understanding of SAS and RAID, so basically I'm wondering what's the best way for me to install Windows 10 ? Attach my SSD to one of the LSI ports, or on the 6Gb/s SATA on the mainboard ?

I have no plans to set up any sort of RAID on this machine, just want the best configuration possible in terms of speed, using a single SSD drive for the OS. Is the LSI card overkill, should I just remove it ?

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  • its not uncommon to put the OS and the data on different controllers. additionally it sounds like the SATA controller (w/ only 2 Sata3 ports) would be insufficient for array types that require 3+ disks like Raid5. generally a system configured like this would use Raid1 on SATA (presumably for the local OS) and either use an expansion card or SAN connection for additional arrays.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Feb 4, 2022 at 23:38

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The RAID controller will have extra cache that can provide a bit of a speed boost for writes, but only if you have the CacheVault option that protects the cache contents on power loss.

Without the option, it's not worth it for a single drive.

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