Ideal Hardware Card for Home ZFS Application?

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kronik8

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 16, 2002
Messages
167
Hardware:

Lian Li PC-Q25B
ASRock A75-ITX
AMD A8-3870K
Seasonic SS-460FL
GSkill Ripjaws 16GB Kit
Noctua NF-P14
1 OS SSD, 1 L2ARC SSD, 1 ZIL SSD (might combine some of this, not sure yet)

The case will take 6 drives and I plan to fill it with 3 or 4TBs. Basically, I just need the controllers - the board has a PCI Express 2.0 board for this reason.. I don't necessarily need the overkill of an Areca 1k raid controller, just something that will be supported. I might like ESXi support down the road but not necessarily initially. Looking at OI/Nexenta.

Maybe something like: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118112 ?
 
kronik8 said:
Hardware:

Lian Li PC-Q25B
ASRock A75-ITX
AMD A8-3870K
Seasonic SS-460FL
GSkill Ripjaws 16GB Kit
Noctua NF-P14
1 OS SSD, 1 L2ARC SSD, 1 ZIL SSD (might combine some of this, not sure yet)

The case will take 6 drives and I plan to fill it with 3 or 4TBs. Basically, I just need the controllers - the board has a PCI Express 2.0 board for this reason.. I don't necessarily need the overkill of an Areca 1k raid controller, just something that will be supported. I might like ESXi support down the road but not necessarily initially.
Click to expand...
For a card for ZFS application, IBM M1015 flashed with IT firmware.
 
I'd seen a lot of people going with the M1015, some having quite a bit of trouble with the IT mode.. figured I'd look for alternatives. Seems like I should just bite the bullet.
 
The issues you've likely seen aren't about the card's performance or running it in IT mode, they are likely around the fact that only certain motherboards succeed at flashing the card into IT mode. So assuming you have access to a variety of motherboards for the one time flash, you should be in good shape. Or try to buy it from someone who already has flashed it. Once it's flashed to IT mode I haven't seen any issues reported, I also run 4 of them in IT mode all without issue.
 
1 up for the M1015, using 2 of them both paired with a HP SAS Expander.
Had no trouble flashing it on P35 mobo from M1015 to IT and reflashing it recently from IT to IR with a 990FX mobo (Asrock Fatal1ty).

The card is a beast. And DIRT cheap at that.
 
M1015, dont even have to flash it IMHO. I have two that are working perfectly without being flashed.
 
SAS2008 cards vary in the details but if you don't know what you're doing the m1015 will do the job. br10i doesn't support big disks apparently. and according to a freenas poster, "The IBM M1015 uses the same SAS 2008 6GB/s processor as the LSI 9211-8i controller, and both will support 3TB."
 
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