Other than being Slower and not supporting >2tb, is there anything wrong with an older br10i?

[Gmdfunk]

Other than being slower and only supporting up to 2tb drives, is there anything wrong with the older raid/hba cards like the br10i? I can get a couple of them for like $10 each, and I am running only 2tb drives.

I have a 16 bay freenas server running on an older supermicro h8dme-2 mobo with 16gb ECC ram and dual AMD opteron 2431 CPUs. I have a raidz2 array of 10-2tb drives.

My drives are running off of a couple supermicro sat2-mv8 controllers that are giving me interrupt storms and some other errors that the forum says is not uncommon with these cards. I know they are not well supported in BSD, and I need to replace them. I know that the recommended card is the m1015, but that is $75-100 each, and I would need 2 to fill the bay's in my server. I don't have much money for newer hardware and what I am running now was almost free and works well other than some errors that relate to the sat2-mv8's. So until I upgrade and get larger drives, is there any reason not to just use a cheap older HBA?

 

[ttabbal]

I'm using an LSI 1068 based card with no problems. It's from an older build, but works fine in FreeNAS 9.10. As you mentioned, slower (doesn't matter for spinners), 2.2TB max, but it does work fine. I haven't used that particular card, but if you can get an IT mode firmware or similar on it, so it's not trying to do hardware RAID, it should be alright.

 

[jgreco]

The SAT2-MV8's should be considered incompatible.

The BR10i seems to work fine though we only have one of them at this point, I think.