Some 2308 based cards support 1024 devices.
Let's just call it an asymptotic approximation of infinity for all practical purposes.Which isn't really meaningful since 512 devices per SAS multilane (4 x 6Gbps) gets you 3 GBytes/sec, which if divided by 12 drives gives you 250MBytes/sec to each drive, but if divided by 512 gives you 6MBytes/sec to each drive. I'm sure that'd be useful on archival systems but on a ZFS pool it's ... limiting.
Some 2308 based cards support 1024 devices.
At some point, a highly-trained gorilla handling tapes might just be faster...In this case you can run a small datacener with 1 card. Awesome !:))))
And then you put an 1 or 10Gbe interface behind that and your point is moot because those pipes aren't fast either. Also, IOPS.Which isn't really meaningful since 512 devices per SAS multilane (4 x 6Gbps) gets you 3 GBytes/sec, which if divided by 12 drives gives you 250MBytes/sec to each drive, but if divided by 512 gives you 6MBytes/sec to each drive. I'm sure that'd be useful on archival systems but on a ZFS pool it's ... limiting.
And then you put an 1 or 10Gbe interface behind that and your point is moot because those pipes aren't fast either. Also, IOPS.
Have you checked if the disks are visible in FreeNAS?Tonight I flashed an LSI 9207-8i to IT mode and installed it in my system. The LSI controller itself is recognized and I can access it in the BIOS but no disks that are attached to it. I put the disks back on my intel integrated SATA ports and they are fine so I know the physical disks themselves are fine.
Any ideas or thoughts on how to debug?