PCI-E SATA-III HBA for FreeBSD 10

[Tom Evans]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 5:15 PM, Roger Leigh <rleigh at codelibre.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for a low-profile SATA-III adapter to put in an HP N40L
> microserver running FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.  I'd like to use a set of
> SSDs with it for ZFS ZIL and L2ARC as well as for the main system.
> I briefly tried a StarTech PEXSAT34SFF adapter with a Marvell
> 88SE9230 controller:
>
> http://www.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/HDD-Controllers/SATA-Cards/PCI-Express-SATA-III-RAID-Controller-Card-Mini-SAS-SFF-8087~PEXSAT34SFF
>
> ahci0: <Marvell 88SE9230 AHCI SATA controller> port 0xe800-0xe807,0xe400-0xe403,0xe000-0xe007,0xd800-0xd803,0xd400-0xd41f mem 0xfe8ff800-0xfe8fffff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci2
> ahci0: AHCI v1.20 with 8 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier not supported
> ahci0: quirks=0x800<ALTSIG>
>
> However, I had to return it due to a couple of faults: the SFF-8087
> cable was broken for one port, and it wouldn't work in the
> microserver in combination with an Icy Dock SATA backplane.  Its
> performance was also pretty bad; on Linux I'm getting 475 MB/s from
> an SSD using the native SATA III ports on the mainboard.  This was
> 320 MB/s with the adapter.  FreeBSD only got 90 MB/s with the
> adapter which was a bit disappointing!
>
> While the card and cable here were not operating correctly, I'd be
> interested to know any good recommendations for a SATA-III adapter
> which works well with FreeBSD 10, and with decent performance.
>

Cards supported by mps(4), eg LSI SAS2008 based cards, are very well
supported and very fast. Flash to "IT mode" for use with ZFS.

Cheers

Tom