Solved Cheap/supported SATA card

spork

spork

That's about the size of it - PCIe 2.0 or 3.0, full height. Should support booting.

I have an HP ML10 and I've used up all the onboard ports and need a few more... currently booting off an SSD jammed in a SATA to USB enclosure.
 
You can probably pick up a refurbished/second hand LSI SAS2008 based card fairly cheaply. Those are really good cards with good support on FreeBSD.
 
SirDice said:
You can probably pick up a refurbished/second hand LSI SAS2008 based card fairly cheaply. Those are really good cards with good support on FreeBSD.
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This is the one that I see people talking about all the time that can be flashed between two different modes (RAID vs. JBOD), right? Looks like roughly $100 new, $50 used - does that sound right?

Dizzying array (no pun intended) of variations listed here: https://www.servethehome.com/lsi-sas-2008-raid-controller-hba-information/
 
spork said:
Do you boot off this card? $13 is cheap enough to experiment...
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My drives were visible in the BIOS, so I'm assuming you can boot, but I haven't booted off of them. (I'm using them strictly for storage on a separate ZFS pool.) The pricetag is why I bought several. My motherboard supported 3 of them.
 
4 SATA3 ports on a PCIe x1 slot seems pushing it doesn't it? That would require 2200 megabytes/sec.

I do agree about LSI Boards.
On ebay the IBM M1015 are really cheap. They do require a SF-8087 breakout cable too.
 
Phishfry said:
4 SATA3 ports on a PCIe x1 slot seems pushing it doesn't it? That would require 2200 megabytes/sec.
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True, if you are reading/writing to all 4 disks at once you'll saturate the link. An x4 version would be better. Or just the dual-port card. :D

Didn't notice the 4-port card was also an x1.

Edit: there's an x2 version of the 4-port card, but the price jumps to just under $60. Guess you get what you pay for. :)
 
Phishfry said:
4 SATA3 ports on a PCIe x1 slot seems pushing it doesn't it? That would require 2200 megabytes/sec.
Click to expand...

With spinning disks, the maximum sustained bandwidth is about 200-250 MByte/s. On a 4-port SATA card, that multiplies out to about 800-1000 MByte/s. Only SSDs are capable of sustaining higher speeds. For comparison, a PCIe-3 slot x1 can handle pretty accurately 1GByte/s. So the match isn't completely awful, just marginal.
 
But it advertises at PCIe2.0 which at x1 means 500MB/s
So really one SSD drive would saturate the interface.
Right?
 
Correct, these are PCIe 2.0 cards, so a max of 250 MBps per direction (500 MBps bidirectional).

A dual-port card with heavy read/write load could saturate the link. A 4-port card where there's lots of read/write to all disks would be bottlenecked. The x2 version would be just enough bandwidth for 4 spinning disks.

Even a cheap SSD is fast enough to saturate a PCIe 2.0 x1 link.
 
Well, the $13 card is on order. I don't think the bandwidth limitation is an issue for me - it's just for small SSD boot drive and to workaround some stupidity in the HP BIOS that requires you to have your boot drive as the 1st drive on the onboard controller. I totally don't want to evict a full size 3.5" drive out of it's nice mounting cage to make HP's sucky BIOS happy. My prior workaround was an SSD in a USB enclosure, so the $13 card, if it works, will be an improvement. I'll probably also route the extra port out to an eSATA port for giggles.
 
For the curious, this is the $13.99 card:


Code: 
ahci0: <ASMedia ASM1062 AHCI SATA controller> port 0x5000-0x5007,0x5008-0x500b,0x5010-0x5017,0x5018-0x501b,0x5020-0x503f mem 0xfbff0000-0xfbff01ff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci6
ahci0: AHCI v1.20 with 2 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier supported
ahci0: quirks=0xc00000<NOCCS,NOAUX>
ahcich0: <AHCI channel> at channel 0 on ahci0
ahcich1: <AHCI channel> at channel 1 on ahci0
...
ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <CT250MX500SSD1 M3CR020> ACS-3 ATA SATA 3.x device
ada0: Serial Number 1819E13B3C0F
ada0: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 512bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 238475MB (488397168 512 byte sectors)

Also some bonnie output in a weird, but "whatever, here's some data" comparison. The top drive is an extremely expensive Intel enterprise SSD (in it for the endurance at 5 DWPD) on a built-in Intel port vs. a new Crucial MX-500 in the $14 card.

Screen Shot 2018-06-29 at 2.02.15 AM.png
 
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