Solved PCIe to Sata III adapter recommendation

M

mefizto

Greetings all,

I need to ad two additional SATA III ports to my motherboard. On a different thread I have discussed the option of PCIe to M.2/mSATA, but considering the cost as noted by wblock, it may be more economical to use PCIe to SATA III.

Could someone recommend a reliable adapter? I will use FreeBSD for crating pool with the drives so no RAID needed; PCIe 3.0 compatibility preferred.

Kindest regards,

M
 
Cards based on the LSI-2308 are really good but they're not cheap. Cards based on SiI3132 will work too. As do most cards that provide AHCI. I had a cheap Promise SATA300 card that had been working fine for a few years. It was cheap and didn't have stellar performance but functioned perfectly fine until it burned out.
 
I have not tested the SiL3132 cards recently, but have two of them. It is probably worth navigating the maze to upgrade the firmware on them.

Some people here have used the ASM1061-based cards with success.
 
Hi SirDice, wblock,

thank you for your replies. Based on them, I have identified the LSI chips and did further research, which indicates that the FreeNAS people have success with IBM M1015 re-flashed to IT mode, which is equivalent to LSI 9211-8i. Both of these cards are reasonably priced on e-bay.

Any experience with them?

Kindest regards,
 
Not this specific card but one of my clients has a bunch of machines with various LSI adapters. They've all been running FreeBSD for the past 3 or 4 years without a hitch. I recently bought the LSI-2308 for my home system after the Promise card burned out. I really wished I had done that sooner, the LSI card just blows the old Promise away.
 
I just recently converted a couple of Dell PERC H200 and one H310 to LSI cards: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/dell-h200-versus-h310-heat.45822/. They seem fine, although have not seen much testing yet. I would use them again, but the H200 cards at least need good airflow. The H310 ran much cooler but with only one sample it is hard to tell if they are all like that. I will still add fans to these cards unless there is a case fan blowing air over them.
 
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