Low-end SATA HBA for an ESXi 5.5 home lab?

[richard6121]

I'm in Europe so the ~$100 eBay M1015 which is loved by nearly everyone is not readily available to me.  Are there any cheap SATA controllers with ESXi support, official or unofficial?  I've used all six of my ICH9 ports on my mainboard and I need a few more..

I'm also happy to accept tips on getting the JMicron JMB363 working with 5.5.

[OscarDavey]

Amazon.com: IBM Serveraid M1015 SAS/SATA Controller 46M0831: Electronics

Cheapest offer u can get i guess

Best regards

Yours, Oscar

[Gortee]

I know this is not what you have asked but it's my work around.  I have avoided this issue by using iSCSI or NFS based storage.  For the cost of these controllers you can easily setup another PC running something like NexentaStor.  Nexenta allows you to use SSD as a read / write cache to improve performance.   If you setup a nice 1Gb network for storage you can really beat local storage performance.   (Of course if you wish to use vSan this whole plan goes away)  It's just my way of getting around the ever changing HCL around the storage.