12 SATA ports via PCI-X slots

[dieterbsd at engineer.com]

>> And I just noticed on the Newegg.com photos of the AOC-SAT2-MV8 that
>> for disk activity there doesn't seem to be a ground pin for each 
disk,
>> just one common ground pin. Which, for me at least, sucks because all
>> of the disk activity LEDs in my chassis have their own ground wire 
and
>> are terminated in duplex headers, not the split headers.
>
> - The optional BIOS ROMs don't play nice with other extension cards 
you
> might have on a busy system. You might want to disable them and leave
> the disk initialization to FreeBSD.

How does one disable the BIOS ROMs on expansion cards?  Is this
specific to the AOC-SAT2-MV8, or can you do this on the mainboard?
Sounds like the sort of thing they would hide in the mainboard BIOS
somewhere.  I have a couple of JMB363 cards that I think would work
better without the BIOS ROMs.  Unfortunately I have never run across
any sort of "turn off expansion card BIOS ROM" option.

If at all possible get cards that have NCQ support in the driver
(e.g. ahci(4) or siis(4)).  Write performance is 10-13 times as
fast with NCQ, and the system doesn't get clogged up with
outstanding work.