A
quick check on-line shows that it looks somewhat similar to (but with fewer features than) the traditional Dell PERC RAID controllers.
BOSS-S1 is a simple RAID solution card designed specifically for booting a server's operating system. The card supports up to two 6 Gbps M.2 SATA drives. The BOSS-S1 adapter card has a x8 connector using PCIe gen 2.0 x2 lanes, available only in the low-profile and full-height form factors. The BOSS-S1 modular card has a dedicated slot in modular servers.
NOTE: : BOSS-S1 card allows you to create only one virtual disk from the available physical disks. Specifying the size of a virtual disk is not supported.
NOTE: : There are no status LEDs on the BOSS-S1 card.
You can configure a single RAID1 device from the BIOS. And you can then boot from that virtual "disk".
You don't have to use RAID1 in the controller. It also operates in JBOD (non-RAID) mode. Remove the RAID configuration in the BIOS to expose two raw "disks". You would then have the option to configure software RAID in FreeBSD if you wanted (ZFS or gmirror).
I got the impression that hot swapping SSDs was a problem. You might want to investigate this, as any SSD failure would mean an outage.
The controller supports the SMART protocol. This has the potential to monitor and warn of problems. You would need to test it with
smartd
to see what and how it reports.
There's a separate set of CLI utilities available for Windows, Linux and VMware. I was not able to download them to check further (need a service tag or serial number). The traditional PERC CLI utilities are both useful and extensive.
However, the CLI utilities are not available for FreeBSD. But SMART would probably give you enough for basic error detection.
PERC controllers have a battery. This is essential for preserving the cache in the event of power loss. There is no battery on the BOSS-S1, but the on-board cache is write-through.
TRIM is supported in JBOD (non-RAID) mode. Presumably the RAID controller does the TRIMing when RAID1 is configured in the controller..
SLOGs (dedicated ZILs) mostly need really low latency and reliability when power is lost. Given that the cache is write-through, I think it would work as a SLOG provided:
- you configure the SSDs in some sort of mirror (hardware or software); and
- the SSDs have power loss protection (the data sheet for the model you have should tell you that).
However SLOGs only need tiny capacity. You are going to have a lot of spare space.
Also, SLOGs only help when you have heavy
synchronous writing (databases and the like).