PCIe SATA HBA for ZFS on -STABLE

[Matt Thyer]

On 7 June 2011 12:03, Matthew Dillon <dillon at apollo.backplane.com> wrote:

>    The absolute cheapest solution is to buy a Sil-3132 PCIe card
>    (providing 2 E-SATA ports), and then connect an external port multiplier
>    to each port.  External port multiplier enclosures typically support
>    5 drives each so that would give you your 10 drives.
>

I've decided to avoid issues with port multiplication by going for a
Supermicro AOC-USAS2-L8i and then to flash it to IT (as opposed to IR) mode
to make it run as a standard non-RAID HBA.

As I've got 8 x 2 TB drives for the ZFS raidz2 I'll put them all on the
AOC-USAS2-L8i and save my onboard SATA-II ports for my 2 x 1TB drives for
the FreeBSD O.S. and any eSATA use.

Now the only remaining issue is whether to go with the Supermicro firmware
or the generic Lsi Logic firmware as some have reported better performance
with the version 9 Lsi Logic firmware.

I'll report on my experiences (as I keep a record of the revision of my
-STABLE build this should actually be useful!).