why you do not list lsi drivers ?
vmware use one chipset lsisas1068e to connect drives to the virtual pc....
http://www.lsi.com/products/io-controlle...e.aspx#tab/tab4

i have a mainboard having it , the chip is not able to handle more than 2To ,[ nor trim ? ]
the old ich10 has no trouble to use 4To drive under windows while bios is limited to 2To.
may be you should say more about trim and size capabilities of chips

my board is dual cpu : http://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S7025_S7025WAGM2NR
i had a lot of them starting with pentium2

tyan is a very good brand with a nice sav , supermicro makes good mainboards too

i have two cables having 4 sata connectors at end , i have no idea what is the difference between sata and sas
i updated the rom of the mainboard to latest 6.36 by grabing the one of the pci-e lsi card having the same chipset and cables
i did it thinking it will make the board able to handle hd of more than 2To but no ...
i saw that when i received the 3x4To drive that i used to backup the 6x2To that are installed .
i did that also to apply safely a bios patch for the wdc green .

by now i am discovering and testing the gpt partition system , i wonder if i make a raid 0 of my 6 hds or continue to use them in single mode to spare them and electricity .
i think i ll try raid 0 and do some video remix with this pc and its 12 To
xeon i have are the 5520 that run at 2,2 ghz with 16 Go , they are very powerful in video compression or 7zip

the 3 4To are installed on a supermicro dual cpu and only ich10 but with 2 xeon 6 cores and 48 Go of ram . i found that all last year on ebay , cpu and ram are 2nd hand but perfect and very cheap compared to new .
this pc is perfect for gaming with its 2.8 Ghz cpu , i have two hd5970 [4 gpu dx11] . i wish that win10 and dx12 will make good use of all that power of multithreading . according to what i read : i hope it to be cool for next new coming game ;']
latest gpu cards are nice but very expensive mostly because of their radiators + watercooling system . so i wait for next ati gpu generation and with an option to buy them naked or with a full waterblock installed [ like does evga with nvidia ]

i was not able to read ...my phone-line troubles had killed my energy ....when i ll be satellite 's ready , i ll read it all , all i can say with errors is : that it is a very good idea to visit the hard-drive website and check for update of firmware .
like i said , i did a backup of my drives to apply a patch : http://support.wdc.com/product/download....pid=609&sid=113
this patch was to change the timing before heads are parked , it was set to 8 seconds : so heads were always stopping parking restarting reading...
it concern all ears drives of wdc

to do the transfers i used tixati bittorent client , most of the time i use utorrent to transfers files across computers : i have a hp touchsmart that i use for most of the surfing , downloads....then i use torrent to be sure all files are 100% perfect
windows can do mistake when copying and have no verification process of the files while torrent has it and can check files again and again and repair them ....better than raid xx stripping or else ....["8

this part : may be you should say more about trim and size capabilities of chips
is about the hardware and drivers of the topic you make .
saying if they handle More than 2To drive could help buyers to find the best board for their needs

Firstly Fernando put serious effort into responding to you, well beyond my patience levels! Anyways your Tyan board has two controllers. One ICH10 with Six SATA ports, this is the only relevant controller to Fernando and this forum in general. The other controller is an LSI SAS1068E with Two Mini-SAS. Each Mini-SAS can be connected to an expander controller, or provide you with Four SAS ports (7pin [SATA] cable). I call SATA 7-Pin, because a SATA cable isn't always a SATA cable. In your case you could breakout with a different SAS-SF8087 cable, this would give you four 7-Pin SATA connectors. So in your case you could break out both Mini-Sas ports, giving you Eight 7-Pin SATA connectors. A 7-Pin SATA connector/port connected to SAS it is not a SATA cable when connected to a SAS drive, the pin usually used for ground (i recall), is used for RW. Giving SAS connected drives the extra pipelines they need for command queues, and dual link redundancy. You can plug any normal SATA Hard-Drive into a broken out Mini-Sas to 7-Pin. You cannot however get a SAS/NLSAS to function on SATA cotroller, even if you use adapters to alter the power to normal sata/molex, and SATA cable. SAS contains different instructions, and operates completely different since its SCSI based. In terms of magnetic storage SAS is the only way to go if your pro. Enterprise level storage systems is far more in-depth than consumer non scsi SATA solutions. However usually perfectly fine for the consumer or professional, for a season sys admin; not at all.

When looking at SATA SSD disks, you might be wise to know that even a 850 Evo Pro, dies when compared to an Intel DC3700 when pro pro usage starts taking place. This is interesting because both are SATA, same size roughly same cost. The DC3700 is old, 1/3 the overall speed of the Evo 850 Pro. However the DC3700 handles the queues on its controller like an Enterprise SCSI device would. So when the DC3700 max's its Queues it doesn't abort all opperations (something like that). However the Evo 850 Pro aborts all active commands when it maxes out its disk queue depth. Really only applicable for virtualization or SAN's. But you can test this at home, just launch two or more Virtual Machines using your standard SATA SSD. Run a disk benchmark on them at the same time, and notice the bottleneck you just created. Hopefully its not your OS disk, because that will start shuttering big time as well. Put the VMs on a disk that can handle queues, and controller with queues and your off to the races. Here is a good article on the subject, but very deep dive. Yellow-Bricks

Just the following simple base example tells us why. A SATA controller nor sata disk know of, or have in memory the last command executed. So when that command fails, it aborts all active commands, unable to single out the failed one. So everything else going on gets halted, sometimes an entire disk abort command is issued. So if your truly multi-tasking magnetic storage arrays, requiring real Queue Depths, SATA Drives are miserable. There are special cases for SSD, but obviously SAS SSD is greater than 2k in cost. SATA Drives carry a Queue Depth of 32 cmds, which fills up instantly upon multi-tasking. Your SATA controller caries a queue depth of 31. You will get around 128 Queues in RAID0 Spans or 6,10,etc (for the disk). Once the mentioned Queue Depth total of 128+31=160 is used up, your system is experience serious resource contention, and crazy disk latency is prevalent. Not sure about the LSI 1068E you have, but decent LSI SAS HBA's start at around 600 cmd Queue Depth. So instead of 31+32=64 Queues on a SATA drive you get 600+32=632 cmd queues, regardless of RAID levels. This is the fundamental reason why HBA's and Hardware RAID kills on-board solutions. An on-board SAS Controller like the 1068E is not hardware raid, it is an HBA, it does not have cache or is battery capable. However it will be far faster and efficiant than using the ICH10 to power ones SATA RAID Arrays. Plug in a few SAS Magnetic Disks, and your have real latency free high queue depth raid arrays. You could even at this point add an additional HBA (LSI controller) and have two 7-Pin SATA cables coming from each SAS Drive, each one in a different controller. Providing your fault tollerance if a controller dies. SCSI/SAS has always been amazing. With SAS Expanders you can hook up over 200 drives on one typical $150 SAS HBA.

So in your case you would want to utilize you LSI controller for all your Disk Drives + RAID arrays, and if possible disable the ICH10 obnoard controller. Tylersberg generation stuff suffers from IRQ satuation due to sharring. Disabling unused devices, which eat up IRQ's is a must. So just flash your LSI to the latest firmware, install the the GUI tool for your OS, and your good to go. Obviously you can just set it up in the bios as well. Granted i lost the op by the second sentence, but still the above is informative. Almost forgot... Trim with newer SSD's isn't that relevant since the disks controller itself does garbage collection, sanity checks, and trim stuff. Moreover if your at the SAS level of things, the entire topic of Trim moot.

Also there is no SUCH THING AS A "LSI SATA/NAS Controller". No such thing as a NAS Controller period. Network Attached Storage is a single serving SOC or small form factor pc/system OS, with hard-drive connections and network interface. Pr-Conditioned to serve specific network transfer protocols, usually slicked up with a web server and front-end.

Cheers

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