Many SATA disks

[Daniel Feenberg]

We would like to build a FreeBSD machine ourselves with many (~15) SATA 
drives, but NOT use a RAID controller. We want to be able to remove any 
drive and connect it to an ordinary motherboard SATA port and mount the 
filesystem using only the OS provided drivers and tools. I have built many 
FreeBSD systems, but never used port multipliers and don't know which 
controllers advertised as RAID controllers will support a plain pass-thru 
mode. Would anyone like to make a suggestion from actual experience?

The system will be used solely for archiving, so performance is not 
critical, but portability of the partitions to other systems is necessary.

Daniel Feenberg
NBER