Looking for bootable EHCI friendly USB 2.0 PCIe card

[JarrodBradford]

Hi everyone.

So I'm getting ready to build a home NAS system and have my eye on the ASRock Rack E3C236D2I Mini ITX system board. I'm going to be using all six of the onboard SATA ports for data drives and will ideally be installing from a USB stick onto the internal USB port on the system board. Everything I've been reading tells me that's going to a problem without EHCI support from the chipset and no support for xHCI from FreeNAS yet. Best I can tell, my only option is going to be to use a PCIe USB 2.0 card for now until we get xHCI support. Problem is, I'm having a heck of a time finding a USB 2.0 card that is definitely bootable. I've reached out to ASRock support and they're looking into to it for me as well but I figured I'd hit you guys up too.

Anybody have a suggestion?

Also, since everyone seems to like posting what they're running, here's what's on my shopping list (if I can determine it'll work!)

Case: Fractal Design Node 304
Motherboard: ASRock Rack E3C236D2I
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1240 v5 (Need lots of horse power for Plex transcoding)
RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-2133 ECC RAM - (Haven't decided on make/model yet)
HDD: 6x 4TB HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 in RAIDZ3

Thanks in advance for any feedback! Also, I'm a FreeNAS noob and have been lurking the forum long enough to know that there are people trying to get Skylake to play nice with mixed success. Trying to make sure I'm not another statistic!

Jarrod

 

[DrKK]

Something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...r=1&cm_re=USB_2.0_card-_-15-166-014-_-Product
*has* to work, right? You'd think so. It's got EHCI only on it, looks pretty standard...

 

[JarrodBradford]

Thanks DrKK! Very similar to others I've been looking at but I like that it specifies EHCI support. I'm getting close to pulling the trigger on this build. Its a little hard to try to "future proof" when your OS of choice isn't necessarily friendly with bleeding edge hardware. Like I said, trying to not be a statistic. ;)

 

[DrKK]

Thanks DrKK! Very similar to others I've been looking at but I like that it specifies EHCI support. I'm getting close to pulling the trigger on this build. Its a little hard to try to "future proof" when your OS of choice isn't necessarily friendly with bleeding edge hardware. Like I said, trying to not be a statistic. ;)

For $10, and plus I estimate it has an 85% chance of working, I don't see how you lose. Win or lose, the knowledge of whether or not it works as expected is worth at least $10 to the community. :)

 

[schoffman]

That card says PCI and not PCIe so I don't think it will work. I'm working on a Skylake build right now and bought such a card and went to put it in and it didn't line up so I didn't even try. I'm pretty sure the pin pitch is different from PCI to PCIe which would mean no chance of working.

In case it helps since I have 8 sata ports (X11ssh-f) and only using 6 for a Z2 array so I'm going to buy a 250 GB ssd to boot with until USB support arrives then re purpose the SSD to another system or a mirror for jails. I looked at SATA DOM but I won't have use for it after USB support and I want two extra sata ports for a mirror in the future.

What I'm concerned with is getting UPS working with a serial cable.

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah.... PCI and PCI-e are completely and absolutely incompatible at the electrical level. They can be translated, but that requires additional hardware.
They are compatible from the software's perspective.