sremick
Patron
- Joined
- Sep 24, 2014
- Messages
- 323
So I'm trying to investigate ways to move off from a USB flash boot drive. I am using all on-board SATA ports on my motherboard, but I have one PCIe slot available.
My idea is to get a PCIe card with an M.2 connector on it (although I suppose an older mSATA would also be fine) then pick up a quality M.2 SSD.
Problem #1 is that 99% of the M.2 SATA PCIe cards out there actually use a passthrough SATA connector that you tie back to a free SATA port on your motherboard (!!!). Obviously worthless, but it's hard to filter all those out while searching.
I've found a few no-name cards with unknown chipsets... I'm trying to find out what they have, but it's probably nothing quality.
StarTech has the PEX2M2 which uses the ASMedia 1062 chipset. Supposedly this is supported by FreeBSD, but no one seems to think highly of it. And my goal is to move off from USB for the sake of stability and driver support, so going with a questionable SATA chipset would defeat that purpose.
So my question to the forum hive-mind is: does anyone know of a PCIe M.2 add-on card that has its own on-board SATA chipset, and a chipset that is "quality" (Intel?) or otherwise has solid FreeBSD/FreeNAS support?
My idea is to get a PCIe card with an M.2 connector on it (although I suppose an older mSATA would also be fine) then pick up a quality M.2 SSD.
Problem #1 is that 99% of the M.2 SATA PCIe cards out there actually use a passthrough SATA connector that you tie back to a free SATA port on your motherboard (!!!). Obviously worthless, but it's hard to filter all those out while searching.
I've found a few no-name cards with unknown chipsets... I'm trying to find out what they have, but it's probably nothing quality.
StarTech has the PEX2M2 which uses the ASMedia 1062 chipset. Supposedly this is supported by FreeBSD, but no one seems to think highly of it. And my goal is to move off from USB for the sake of stability and driver support, so going with a questionable SATA chipset would defeat that purpose.
So my question to the forum hive-mind is: does anyone know of a PCIe M.2 add-on card that has its own on-board SATA chipset, and a chipset that is "quality" (Intel?) or otherwise has solid FreeBSD/FreeNAS support?