Question about mixing sata ports on motherboard and sata card for zfs raid.

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swalker08

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Apr 18, 2011
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I picked up the Supermicro SAT2-MV8 without paying attention to the slot type (PCI-X). My motherboard doesn't have that slot so i'm sending it back and looking for other ways to utilize the ports on the motherboard and maybe a 4 port sata card. Is it OK to mix on-board sata ports and a 4 port pci-e card for a zfs raid? I have 8 2TB Samsung hard drives looking to put them in a raidz1 or 2 using OpenIndiana.

Thanks again.
 
Should be fine. What you can do is create 2 different RaidZ vdevs(I think thats the term) and then create a one large pool of storage. Think of how WHS used to work with DE.
 
Thanks for the reply. I was also thinking of just creating 2 different vdev's for the 1 pool. Does anyone have any recommendations for sata controllers? Will I get good speeds on a regular PCI sata controller or should i go ahead and get a PCI-E controller?
 
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Get PCI-E for sure. Never use PCI cards unless you have no other choice.
 
Better than PCI for sure. PCI-e 1.1 is limited to 250MB/s per lane. (1 lane for PCI-e x1) PCI-e 2.0 is double that at 500MB/s per lane.

Unless you have a large array, that should be fine. You will see speeds over 1gbps required for network transfer.
 
Yea i think that will be fine for what i need it for. Thanks for the input everyone!
 
In the case of a X9SRH-7TF, is there a problem mixing sata onboard from the LSI2308 (8ports) and other sata onboard ports to achieve a 10*drive raidZ2 ?
 
We have vdevs with disks on mixed ports/controllers on all our ZFS-based systems and it has never been an issue.
 
I try to either mix ports intentionally, like in my dual mirror set (raid 10 basically), so it stay alives if a card fails (same thing with backplanes), or keep all vdevs on the same card (in the archive raidz2 array), so it all drops offline if the card fails.
 
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