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by bbatha 296 days ago
> The SATA controller has been a bit flaky, but you can pick up 4-port SATA cards for about $10 each.

If your build allows the extra money for an LSI or real raid controller is well worth it. The no-name PCI-e sata cards are flakey and very slow. Putting an LSI in my NAS was a literal 10x performance boost, particularly with zfs which tends to have all of the drives active at once.
2 comments
magicalhippo 296 days ago
> If your build allows the extra money for an LSI or real raid controller is well worth it.

Keep in mind if you get a real RAID controller and want to use ZFS, you probably want to ensure it can present the disks to the OS as JBOD. Sometimes this requires flashing a non-RAID firmware.

That said, slightly older LSI cards are quite cheap on eBay, and the two I've bought have worked perfectly for many years.

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ddtaylor 296 days ago
I am curious about the slow part. I use these crappy SATA cards and I am sure they are crappy, but the drives are only going to give 100MB/s in bursts and they have an LVM cache (or ZFS stuff) on them to sustain more short-term writes.

I get if I was wiring up NVME drives that are going to go 500MB/s and higher all the time.

What I really care about with the SATA and what I mean by flaky is I when I have to reboot a system physically every day because the controller stays on in some way even if it gets a soft `reboot` command and then Linux fills up with IO timeouts because the controller seems to stop working after X amount of time.

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