My server got a Dell PERC H330 raid card, and I made it’s working in HBA mode to make sure that it can get best performance under FreeBSD with zfs.
But every time when I boot the server, I’ll get below error message and it take a long time to pass the disk check stage.

After research, it seems this timeout error was caused by the old mfi driver.
And LSI has released a new mrsas driver for FreeBSD. So It’s better to switch the driver from mfi to mrsas.

First, add below line into /boot/loader.conf

mrsas_load="YES"

And then add below device hint into /boot/device.hints . This line is very important. Without this device hint, FreeBSD will use the old mfi driver for raid card even though you enabled maras drvier.

hw.mfi.mrsas_enable="1"

And then, add below line into /boot/loader.conf to disable disk id identity.

kern.geom.label.gptid.enable="0"
kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="0"

Without above two line, after you switch from mfi to mrsas, all the disks will be shown as diskid-*****************。

And don’t forget to update /etc/fstab to change the swap partition from mfi*p* to da*p*. Otherwise you’ll lose your swap partition.

Then, reboot your server, and enjoy.