It is also hard to find a motherboard with 8 SATA ports. They are out there, but you end up getting them split across different types of controllers which makes things complicated. And since you can pick up an M1015 for around $100 and flash it to IT mode I see no point in messing around with shaky onboard SATA controllers.
Recently you can also get an Asrock Avoton motherboard with 12 SATA ports, spreaded across three controllers, but that shouldnt be any problem.
That board actually splits the SATA ports across 3 controllers and they are not all 6Gbps. It also costs nearly $400 and doesn't support ECC ram. If you are going to build a ZFS-based NAS you really should be using error correcting ram. Buying a cheap $130 Supermicro board and a $100 M1015 seems like a smarter and cheaper solution.
It uses 3 controllers, true, but 8 ports out of 12 are SATA III 6GB/s ports, and the controllers split should not be an issue.
The statement about not supporting ECC is untrue, that board in fact does support ECC RAM.
Also, its $400, but its not a board alone but it also includes the CPU and cooling for it, it wont require PCI controller due to high number of ports (wider choice of smaller cases) and requires amazingly low amount of power.
Ah oops, misread the ASROCK specs and that board does support ECC ram so in that sense it is ok. And the low power consumption of the Atom chip would work well. I still don't like the price though.
Getting split across multiple controllers is not a bad thing if you want to avoid corruption due to failed / faulty controller (I've got six controllers in my box, driving 12 disks).
If the controllers were the same type I would agree, but that seems to never be the case with these.
You shouldn't want controllers of the same type, no? That increases chances of data loss due to design flaw.
I am more worried about driver issues. For example on my hackintosh the SATA ports on the Marvel controller are extremely flaky. It may be that the fbsd device drivers are great for the various on board Marvel or Jmicron controllers you are likely to see but I still feel better using the known LSI driver.
Well he has a RAID controller in his build, so I would assume you ignore the built-in SATA so you can use RAID. He's also using SAS connectors to convert four SATA cables into one SAS connector (to avoid having to have eight cables running from the drives to the board).
No, FreeNAS uses ZFS for RAID. Generally, you want to disable any RAID features in your card so it presents the disks as JBOD to the OS to avoid incompatibilities, which he did.