07Feb Freenas PCI-e 4 port SATA upgrade revisited

It’s been awhile since I’ve made any changes to my original Freenas build (you can find that here). At 18TB of storage in raidz I still have 4TB left which seems to give me enough of a buffer when deleting and adding new projects to the Freenas box. The old PCI-e 4 port SATA card I’ve been using occasionally gives me slow downs when transferring files over the network, sometimes dropping down to as little as 20MB/s for a few minutes before jumping back up to 80 or 90MB/s. So I’ve decided to try and find a replacement.

After doing a little bit of research, I came across the Crest SATA III 4 Port PCI-e card. Some people say it works great with Freenas while others say that it isn’t supported by with Freenas at all. I picked up this card with the intention of find out. At a price of $35 it’s 22 dollars cheaper than my old SATA 4 port card and it supports SATA 6GB as opposed to the 3GB limit on the older card.

If all goes well I’ll be installing the Crest SATA III 4 Port PCI-e card this weekend and let you know if it is in fact compatible with Freenas. If it isn’t I’ll probably still keep it around and install it into one of my other systems. Freenas has worked great for me and saved me quite a bit of money, but I wish there was a little more information out there on supported PCI-e cards. Hopefully this test will help a few of you out.

UPDATE: The install took less time than I thought. I can confirm that the Crest SATA III 4 Port PCI-e card does work with Freenas. Currently running 9.2.1 (lastest version) and all the attached drives were detected by Freenas without any problem.

Tags: FreeNas, Freenas PCI-e 4 port adapter, Video Storage