Recommend a Controller Card for SATA 3 drives compatible with FreeNAS 8.3

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janne.hallenius

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Hi!

My preliminary setup is the following:
Casing: Fractal Design Define R3
Memory: Corsair 16GB (2x8192MB) CL10 1600MHz VENGEANCE
Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V
Power supply: Fractal Design Tesla R2 500W 80+ Gold
CPU: Intel Core i5 3450 3,1Ghz (Ivy Bridge)
Hard drives: 6 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm SATA 6Gbit/s

Will run FreeNas of course and on my motherboard there is 4 x SATA 6GB/s connections and another 4 x 3 GB/s connections. I have got six drives though (7 with the SSD), all 6GB/S

As cache I might use a:
SSD 60GB INTEL 330 RESELLER 2.5

Now, my question is, should I get a separate controller card to plug in to one or two of the PCI lots and get all the hard drives on SATA 3 or should I just use the onboard connections, which is a mix

I have looked in to the FreeBSD hardware recommendations and I can't find any SATA III cards there that are easy to come by. ADAPTEC do manufacture a new series called the 7 series

http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/products/series/7/

They are not on the list but on the other hand, ADAPTEC seem to produce compatible controllers, am I right?

These are actually RAID controllers so maybe some other adapter would be in place if I am running ZFS? Or should I just turn RAID off on the card?

Anyway, does anyone have experience with some kind of controller that is compatible with FreeNAS 8.3 and maybe also with a setup similar to mine?!

Haven't found any good info so far on the forum

Thanks a lot

Jan
 

cyberjock

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Mar 25, 2012
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SATA 3 means nothing for standard disks. There isn't a platter based drive fast enough to even hit SATA 2 limits. If you look around the forum there's a post of a bunch of recommended controllers for FreeNAS and their potential bottlenecks based on the number of hard drive ports on the card and the interface of the card.
 

janne.hallenius

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Jun 21, 2012
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Done deal!

Thanks for your advice guys! It is a jungle before you are up to speed with all standards, what they mean and also all the bull on performance of harddrives etc

This seems to be the deal for me

IBM M1015 flashed to IT mode

Will order one today. Guess more than one crad is of no use when it comes to performance having read the other topics on the forum.

Jan
 

cyberjock

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Mar 25, 2012
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That's a well supported card in the community. It's almost a sort of "default" configuration. You'll get very good use and performance with it and its relatively inexpensive. Congrats!
 

janne.hallenius

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Jun 21, 2012
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Thanks noobsauce for your reply, it is good to get a bit of feedback so you know you get a good set up. It takes a bit of research when you are new to both UNIX and PCs at the same time, having been a Mac user for too long!

Thanks and have a good weekend

Jan
 
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