I need a couple more sata ports on my Supermicro board, I need a Disk / RAID Controller?

[EvanVanVan]

I have a Supermicro MBD-X9SCL-F-O motherboard. I guess I forgot when I ordered it a month ago that it only had 6 sata ports on it because I went out and bought (8) 3TB WD Reds. Or I sort of remember looking at the Disk / Raid list in the FAQ when I ordered all of my parts. Either way, now I have 8 drives and only 6 sata ports, so I guess I'm going to need that disk controller.

Edit: After seeing the note about the hardware in that thread being for FreeNas 8.0 and no longer being up to date, I'm just going to trash most of my original post and ask a few questions about a disk controller...

1. The hardware thread has a note about PCI not being recommended, that's referring to PCI specifically, meaning PCI-E controllers are OK, correct?

2. I also don't think I'll see any benefit using a SATAIII card over a SATAII card with my WD Reds, correct?

3. Will most PCI-E cards be compatible? (Edit2: I'm guessing I should cross check any card with this list http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.2R/hardware.html)
Edit3: Although the reviews say this Rosewill card (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132008) is compatible while it's not technically on the list.

And of course I wouldn't set up any hardware raid, this is only about connecting a couple more HDs...

and in case the rest of my hardware has anything to do with this I've got a Xeon E3 1230V2 cpu, 32GB of Kingstong KVR16E11K4 ram, and a Corsair HX650 PSU.
Thanks

Edit4: I think I'm going to go with this card (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124045), since I can pick it up at my local Microcenter today.

 

[survive]

Hi Evan,

Answering your questions:

1) PCI is very old and shares it's bandwidth across all the devices that are connected to it. It maxes out at about 125MB/s I believe. PCI-e is a much newer, faster connection technology. Short answer is you want PCI-e.

2) No need to worry about the SATAII\SATAIII speed difference. It takes a fast SSD to come close to the speed of a SATA III port, a SATA II port has plenty of headroom for a hard drive.

3) "Most" covers a lot of ground. The general consensus around here is to get a proper LSI host bus adapter (HBA). For zfs you want the fastest, dumbest controller you can get so avoid hardware RAID cards.

4) Personally I think it would be a shame to put one of those Syba controllers into what is otherwise a very nice system. Don't buy something cheap and local, get the correct part & do it right.

The best thing you could do would be to hit ebay and find yourself an IBM M1015 controller. It should run you about $120 and you can get cables from Monoprice for about $8.00 each. I'd hook up 8 of your drives to it and run the remaining pair off the motherboard ports.

-Will

 

[EvanVanVan]

Thanks, I just got back from buying the Syba but you're right. Compared to the rest of the system, I shouldn't cheap out now. Now I only have to decided if I'd rather eBay it or pay the premium price from Newegg. I usually don't buy expensive items on eBay, especially electronic ones. I feel like there are a lot of fake items on there from china, no?

Edit: Or should I be looking for a used controller from eBay and therefore less likely to be fake? And is there a difference between model numbers 46M0831 and 46M0861? or SAS9220-8I, 46c8933, 68y366, 46m0862?

Thanks again for the help and advice.

Edit: So I ended up getting the m1015 for $145 from serversupply.com but after that, when I went to google what cables I needed, I found this thread (http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...m1015-card-also-look-over-my-parts-list.7867/). Where the guy was able to pick them up for only $85 from the same place two years ago!