PCIe sata cards appear not to be fully supported

[nasacct]

I was getting lots of random zfs errors (never degrading/faulting the same disks). The disks are new and did not report any errors in Truenas or in smartctl. I moved 6 drives over to the sata ports on the motherboard instead of the PCIe sata port card, and the errors disappeared. I am trying to do a larger configuration than the native motherboard ports will allow, but the implementation using the card is too fragile to be relied on. Any ideas?

 

[sretalla]

Any ideas?

It's well understood that some cards are not good:

Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. In the last year or two, we’ve had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use...

www.truenas.com

The solution:
use an HBA card.

Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy ... a primer on basic SAS and SATA

With the introduction of SAS 12Gbps, seems like "it's time" to do a braindump on SAS. Work in progress, as usual. History By the late '90's, SCSI and PATA were the dominant technologies to attach disks. Both were parallel bus multiple drop...

www.truenas.com

 

[nasacct]

Thanks for your response. I am not quite sure how to interpret it... Are you saying Truenas can't be used for enterprise scale things that need more Sata ports than what are provided by the motherboard? OR you need to use a 45 drive case? OR is there a set of 'supported' PCIe multiport cards? If that latter can you point me to that list?

Thanks again.

 

[sretalla]

Since your hardware and requirements are entirely unknown to us at this point, I'll refer you to the hardware guide, which essentially recommends any HBA using LSI SAS controllers with SAS2008, SAS2308 or SAS300 chips.

FreeNAS® Quick Hardware Guide

This is the FreeNAS Quick Hardware Guide. It is not meant as a replacement for the Hardware Recommendations Guide - it is just a sort of quick reference for popular parts. To download this document use the orange button. If you know of...

www.truenas.com

As clearly mentioned in the first post I linked (look at the last paragraph), your best bet for an option probably as cheap as the useless PCI SATA card you have is

a used LSI HBA on eBay, where the PERC H200's and PERC H310's are often available for $30

A little searching on the forum on those model names will net you the way to flash those to the proper formware and you're off to the races with enterprise-class SATA connectivity.

 

[nasacct]

Thanks... that the info I needed.