Not so fast... Can anyone recommend a 4 or 8 port (it seems there is not much difference in price) SATA or SAS card that can do hardware RAID 10 (not soft RAID or Hardware assisted)? PCI-e x1 or x4 preferred, but will settle for x8. Compatible with ESXi 5/5.1 as well.
How about the LSI 9260-8i or Dell Perc H700?
I don't know how much you expected to pay for such a controller, but I've found an IBM ServerRAID M5014 at 300AU$ and another ServerRAID 5110 (based on the LSI 2208 - successor of the 2108 ) for ~220$ (plus ~45AU$ for shipping). Unless you are lucky at a local shop, I don't think you'll find much better than those.They'd be nice, but new, they are $450 ~ $500 in Aus.
They'd be nice, but new, they are $450 ~ $500 in Aus.
Absolutely, on provision you have enough RAM on the host. I can't remember what the FreeNAS recommendation, but IIRC it's in the order of 8GB+ of RAM.And just a thought, would zfs be an alternative to RAID? Especially if I'm only going to create some pools on a FreeNAS box and serve them up to a couple of VM's?