Cheap PCI SATA controller

[qwertymodo]

I'm looking to upgrade one of our FreeNAS boxes at work that is currently running 9.2. From my personal experience on my home box, 9.3+ tends to shred thumb drives in no time, so I'm thinking of upgrading to a pair of SATA DOM's for the boot pool. Unfortunately, I'm out of SATA ports, and will need to add a PCI card. This being for the boot disk, I really don't need anything fancy or fast (as basically anything will be faster than the current single USB thumb drive anyway), I just need it to be boot compatible. I was originally looking at a ASM1061 chipset card from Syba, but it seems that FreeNAS can't boot from that card per this comment: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/sata-controller-problem.6117/#post-52394 Any good suggestions for a decent cheap card?

 

[jgreco]

You may need to boot off a mainboard port. I believe @joeschmuck has some SATA controller that he's been using to add two ports for drives, would be worth searching for.

 

[qwertymodo]

Ok, I did find his post here where he names the SYBA SI-PEX40062 as the model, but I don't see if he's booting off of the PCI card ports. I'll shoot him a PM.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, no, he's definitely not booting off them. Between the lines, I was saying you probably need to find some extra SATA ports for HDD, and then use the DOM on the mainboard ports to boot from.

 

[qwertymodo]

I was able to boot from a SATA SSD connected to this PCI-E card (software was ESXi 6.0, not FreeNAS), that was my original plan but then I found out I couldn't assign my motherboard SATA ports as pass-through for ESXi and had to purchase another PCI-E card and then just used those as my pass-through.

Looks like it does work as a boot controller, at least in his machine. If not, I can always go with your jgreco's suggestion and move some of the drives to the PCI card and boot from the mobo (but I'd like to avoid that if possible, the mobo has an Intel controller, and the card is a Marvell chipset)