Ahh yep, that’ll do it. At least you figured out the issue!

I mean… https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/237261/intel-xeon-platinum-8592-processor-320m-cache-1-90-ghz/specifications.html

I use ‘du -Lhs’ to check directory size. How long does it take for you to run that command? The only time I’ve ever run into a ‘du’ command taking a long time is when running it over the network to a slow-ass 2010-era system in California for a project I was doing at work with hundreds of terabytes of data and millions of files.

An HBA (host bus adapter) is a SAS controller (or rather, has a SAS controller chip on it). You mostly just want to make sure that your host (the server) has enough physical PCIe lanes to use the whole card, otherwise you’ll get bottlenecked there. You also want to check whether you’ve got 6G SAS or 12G SAS capability. If your drives only support 6 gig, for example, there’s zero point in buying a 12G SAS card, which is actually nice because 6G cards are a lot cheaper. You do want to make sure you actually need an HBA and not a RAID controller though - they’re easily confused. Not sure if I actually answered anything there but I write SAS firmware and use HBAs all the time, so feel free to ask me more and I’ll try to piece together a coherent answer.