I bought an LSI-9207-8i SAS controller on ebay last year and it required that I mask a pin to get it properly working - see the thread at https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/sas-card-and-mem.87727 for background. After a year, I needed to do some rearranging of my system to troubleshoot some stuff and when I pulled the card, the little electrical tape I had used to mask the pins came off and it was a dried up husk of its former self and I got to thinking - maybe, electrical tape wasn't the most brilliant solution for a hardware problem that I had ever come up with...
So, I'm on the hunt for a sas card where I don't need to mask the pins on it to get it working... My Lenovo ThinkCentre m92p SFF is really a great machine for the $150 I paid for it - i7 quad core, 32 gb ram, but apparently, it's not as great my old Dell Optiplex 755 in terms of easy upgradability. It has a limited set of slots and only accepts low profile cards. Here's the slot configuration:
1 PCI-e x1 slot
1 PCI-e x16 slot (noted as a graphics card slot... which probably explains the need for masking the SMB pins of the LSI-9207)
2 PCI card slots (look like 32 bit PCI 5v)
Any tips of finding a good card that works in this machine and freebsd gets along with?
So, I'm on the hunt for a sas card where I don't need to mask the pins on it to get it working... My Lenovo ThinkCentre m92p SFF is really a great machine for the $150 I paid for it - i7 quad core, 32 gb ram, but apparently, it's not as great my old Dell Optiplex 755 in terms of easy upgradability. It has a limited set of slots and only accepts low profile cards. Here's the slot configuration:
1 PCI-e x1 slot
1 PCI-e x16 slot (noted as a graphics card slot... which probably explains the need for masking the SMB pins of the LSI-9207)
2 PCI card slots (look like 32 bit PCI 5v)
Any tips of finding a good card that works in this machine and freebsd gets along with?