Are These MOBO's Any Good

[fungus1487]

Sorry to spam the forums with yet more "does this hardware work" but... does this hardware work? :)

I'm looking at the following MOBO's to support a 20 disk nas. My main question is about the onboard SATA controllers for these MOBO's.
I can't find any more information other than they use Intel H67 or Intel Z68 chipsets and trying to find if these are supported in FreeNAS/FreeBSD is proving difficult.

Initially I thought because these do not appear on the http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.2R/hardware.html#DISK hardware requirements page that they indeed are not supported but there are a lot of H67 chipset boards on the market so would this mean every one of these is a no go? Anyway if anyone could clarify if FreeNAS supports and works well with any of the following MOBO's I would be grateful.

Gigabyte GA-PH67-DS3-B3
Asus P8H67 Rev B3
Asus P8H67-M LX Rev3
Gigabyte GA-H67MA-USB3-B3
Asus P8H67-M-LE Rev3
Gigabyte GA-Z68P-DS3
Asus P8Z68-V LX
Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3

P.S. I only need 4 working SATA Ports as the rest will be run through 2 AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards.

 

[Trianian]

I can't tell you, but I can tell you how to find out.

In most cases, you can look up the specs at Intel's site to see how many SATA ports the chipset supports.

For instance, over half of the motherboards you've listed use the Intel H67 chipset, the rest the Z68 chipset. According to Intel, the H67 chipset supports 4 SATA 2, and 2 SATA 3. (I think the Z68 is the same)
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/mainstream-chipsets/h67-express-chipset.html

Therefore, any H67 motherboard featuring more than 4 SATA-2 plus 2 SATA-3 ports is using some other chipset for the excess ports. In many (perhaps most) cases, a Marvell chipset is running the extra ports. While some older Marvell SATA 3 chipsets had issues, the newer ones get good reviews, at least when used in Windows boxes.

There have been numerous questions asking whether the newer Marvell chipsets work with FreeNAS 8, as yet I've seen no confirmation either way.

If you really only need 4 working SATA ports, any of those motheboards should do. As long as they have 4 SATA ports, you can bet they're run by the onboard Intel chipset, the manufacturer would be crazy to spend money on an ancillary chipset when the built in chipset can handle the task.

To confirm, download the PDF manual of the motherboard you select. I'm not certain about Asus, but I know that Gigabyte lists the SATA chipset manufacturer in most of their manuals.

 

[fungus1487]

Thank you very much for going into detail about this, I figured FreeNAS would need to specifically support the onboard chipset H67/Z68 though to fully utilize the sata ports (or any other hardware specific to that chipset) but what you say makes more sense and makes my original question look stupid :P