Recommended JBOD/HBA Cards

TechMinerUK · 26 Jun 2016 at 10:22

Hi, I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a reliable JBOD/HBA card for FreeNAS on my Microserver as the ones I am currently seeing on the internet are rather expensive, look flaky or are not actual JBOD cards so won't work properly with FreeNAS. I'm looking for a minimum of two SATA drives to be supported by the card if possible and a budget of under £50 ideally (I know it's a low budget)

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated :-)

BlizzardX · 28 Jun 2016 at 20:21

Any card based on the SAS2008 chipset will work, e.g. LSI 9211-8i, IBM m1015 etc. Those can be cross flashed from the raid (IR) firmware to the initiator target (IT) firmware for jbod use... I currently have 3 LSIs flashed in this manner.

The only issue with them is that they do not order drives by sda,b,c etc. they order in the os by the way they are detected on boot up which is often out of the physical order... only the expense adaptec do drive ordering correctly.

TechMinerUK · 28 Jun 2016 at 20:24

BlizzardX said:
Any card based on the SAS2008 chipset will work, e.g. LSI 9211-8i, IBM m1015 etc. Those can be cross flashed from the raid (IR) firmware to the initiator target (IT) firmware for jbod use... I currently have 3 LSIs flashed in this manner.The only issue with them is that they do not order drives by sda,b,c etc. they order in the os by the way they are detected on boot up which is often out of the physical order... only the expense adaptec do drive ordering correctly.

Would that cause a problem with FreeNAS or is it purely from a performance aspect of booting up in the fastest possible method ?

BlizzardX · 29 Jun 2016 at 01:08

Nope, just that if you have hotswap bays, the drive in hotswap bay 1 will likely not enumerate in FreeNAS as drive 1 if you play around... My Xpenology 12 bay build means I keep a spreadsheet of the physical drive positions and their serial numbers so that I can match that to the drives in DSM, freeNAS can do the same.

edit: Thought I'd add that it makes no difference to FreeNAS how the drives are enumerated, but from a user perspective its a little cumbersome as you have to keep track like I do above.