PCI HBA suggestions

dvl@

dvl@

Developer
I want to add more HDD to my system. All of the PCI-E slots are in use, which means I need a PCI card. Usually, I'd go with an IBM M1015 (or similar) as they are LSI cards, but they are PCI-E.

What HBA would you suggest please?

FYI, the box is running FreeBSD 10.3, soon to be 11.x

Thanks.
 
I used to have a Promise SATA300 PCI card (used the ahci(4) driver). It had 4 internal SATA-300 ports. Worked fine until it got fried (after a couple of years service). Went looking for a replacement but it might be out of production. Perhaps eBay still has a few somewhere.
 
The problem being is that the common PCI slot is 32bit, 33MHZ with a max throughput of 133MB/s whereas your single SATA3 SSD these days have 500MB/s reads. Even alot of hard-drives these days manage 100MB/s. 7200rpm models getting 150MB/s
Single modern hard-drive you might be OK with a SATA card.
 
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Yeah, the card I had certainly wasn't fast but it did the job. It was good enough for some basic storage, I had 4 3 TB disks in a RAID-Z pool attached to it. I have since replaced it with an LSI based SAS/SATA card that's orders of magnitude faster but it requires a PCIe x8 slot.
 
Yes, it looks very similar to my old card. The one I had had no support for RAID though. But perhaps they added it on the newer models.
 
How about upgrading one of the existing PCIe Cards to a Card with more Ports? E.g. LSI9201/2 cards are often available quite cheap.
Depending on the bus-width of the card the bandwidth might be shared over more drives compared with an 8-port HBA, but it would still be a lot faster than PCI.
 
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