In need of more SATA ports

Welsper

Welsper

Gawd
Joined
Jun 30, 2005
Messages
754
Hey guys, I have a slight problem, I seem to have built myself into a corner with my fileserver. I used my old gaming system's case, a Coolermaster Cavalier 3 , which only has drive bays for 3 hard drives, those're all full, so I bought a 3tb WD drive in October, shortly before the price hike due to the floods and a 5.25"->3.5" converter to add a fourth harddrive and give me some breathing room, and, with the addition of a SATA CD drive, filling up all 5 SATA ports on my motherboard. Now, I can solve the lack of space to put drives easily enough (a 4-in-3 5.25"-->3.5" enclosure), but I need more SATA ports...what would be a good, basic-ish card (I don't need RAID, for example) that would work with FreeBSD 8.2/9.0 x64, and would work in either a PCI-E x1 slot, or a PCI-E x16 slot. I'd rather not get one with SAS, because I'd never end up using all the ports, I'd have more ports than I'd have drive bays, even with adapters. Thoughts? Also, sorry if this post is disjointed/hard to read, I tend to write rather stream-of-consciousness/rambling.
Edit: Thought I should post how I have the disks set up right now...
Boot drive is a 37.4GB WD Raptor, one of the first ones, 7 years old and going strong.
/home is located on a 500GB drive
/stuff is a 1tb WD Green drive
/3tbstuff is a 3tb WD Green drive. (Which is in the 5.25"->3.5" enclosure
and then obviously the SATA DVD-ROM.
 
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I'd recommend either (I use both w/ Linux)

HighPoint Rocket 620 PCI-Express 2.0 x1 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card (NEW)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115072

Questionable whether it works w/ FreeBSD:
http://support.freenas.org/ticket/1084

SYBA SD-SA2PEX-2IR PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card (Very old chipset)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124027

Found on NewEgg for the SYBA:
Works with FreeBSD
Pros: - Works with FreeBSD 8.1 (use siis.ko kernel module)
- Allow me to use my sata port multiplier (chipset sil3726)

Cons: - Firmware upgrade only possible under Windows
- Does not detect the drives connected to the port multiplier but allows the Operating System to access them

Other Thoughts: If you decide to use this card under FreeBSD with a port multiplier, make sure that your motherboard support AHCI and that you use the ahci.ko kernel module at the boot of the system. I had trouble without it
Click to expand...
 
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