Basic Question : No AHCI and RAID support on Intel H61 chipset. Does Freenas care??

[capndave]

Struggling to understand something basic.

I'm building an ITX nas.
The BIOSTAR TH61 ITX LGA 1155 Intel H61 motherboard seems a good balance.

The Intel H61 chipset has 4 native sata ii ports on the motherboard.
But, the H61 chipset "does not support AHCI or RAID".

I understand that if I were running Windows, that means I could not use the
Intel Storage Matrix drivers.

But, *does this matter for FreeNAS*?? My guess is NO, Freenas doesn't care
about whether the chipset "supports raid".

I'll be running a 6TB Raid-Z (4x2TB, 5900rpm Seagate 6/Gbps drives).

I also don't know whether the AHCI makes a difference. In case it matters,
I'll be running the Celeron G530 and 8GB ram.

Thanks
Dave

 

[mav@]

Lack of RAID support is important only if you are explicitly going to use it.
Lack of AHCI is quite pityfull, as without it you will loose NCQ, hot-plug and some other functionality.
But neither of them is mandatory.

 

[capndave]

Lack of RAID support is important only if you are explicitly going to use it.

I don't understand what you mean b explicitly? I will be using Raid-Z with 4 disks connected to the motherboards 4 Sata ports. Would the performance change at all If the chipset supported raid?

 

[mav@]

I don't understand what you mean b explicitly? I will be using Raid-Z with 4 disks connected to the motherboards 4 Sata ports. Would the performance change at all If the chipset supported raid?

No, it wouldn't (comparing to plain AHCI mode). RAID mode is an AHCI mode with RAID BIOS enabled. It allows to build software RAID volumes for which RAID BIOS will provide booting support. ZFS has no any relations to that. Lack of AHCI support same time is really bad. It will reduce performance substantially, especially it you are using all 4 ports.

 

[capndave]

Quick Followup:

The H61 based motherboard arrived (no AHCI support).
I performed read/write transfers, w/ CIFS, FTP, large/small files, etc.

The NAS saturates the NIC running a RAID0, in all transfer types, protocols.
For RAIDZ, CIFS, I'm getting about 85MB on reads and 65MB on the writes.

My only thinking is that the lack of AHCI support isn't a factor since
I'm not doing a heavy volume of read/writes. Mostly, replication writes.

So the final hardware build vitals are:

Biostar TX61 ITX Motherboard
Intel Celeron 2.4Ghz G530 dual core.
8GB DDR3 1600
3 x 2TB Seagate 5900rpm RAIDZ
Freenas 8.0.4-p2

 

[mav@]

There are two aspects of AHCI performance benefit: dedicated channel for each drive and NCQ support. First has bigger effect, but if less then 4 drives connected, you may be able to achieve the same by carefully picking ports to use. Benefit from NCQ may reach 30% and more, but on some workloads.