Mixing Sata ports

[AVB]

I have a Dell Perc 310 (great deal, much cheaper than the IBM M1015 when I bought it) that has been re-flashed to IT mode. Currently there are 7 drives on it in a ZFS1 pool but I plan to add 3 more drives and rebuild the system to ZFS2 after Black Friday. My question is: Can I mix the 8 ports on the 310 with 2 ports on the motherboard in the same pool or should I make a separate pool with the motherboard ports? All 10 drives will be the same.

 

[cyberjock]

Assuming all of your SATA ports are compatible, yes. Unless you use RAID controllers that don't do disk passthrough(aka jbod) the only thing that matters is if the controller works with FreeNAS. You can gut your machine and use 10 different controllers in a whole new server with 1 disk on each one. And as long as every controller is supported, it'll work just fine. :)

 

[AVB]

Thank for the answer, that is what I suspected but I did notice a slight speed difference between the motherboard controller and the H310 during scrubs, the H310 was slightly faster so I just wanted to be sure.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, extra controllers that aren't just dumb HBAs can have affects on performance. That's why we recommend against RAID controllers. Quite a few can tank performance VERY badly. And when I say "badly" I mean less than 40MB/sec to/from the pool with 10 disk vdevs. :)