I’d like to add a faster NIC to my Truenas Scale build; the motherboard gigabit ethernet is starting to become a bottleneck. The problem is that I’m limited to 1 PCI 3.0 x16 slot (which I’d like to reserve for an HBA in the future), and 2 PCI 3.0 x1 slots. So far all the NICs I’ve found fall into 2 categories;
NIC chip isn’t compatible/recommended for Scale
NIC requires a physical PCI x4 slot
Any NIC recommendations would be appreciated. Hoping I don’t need to swap motherboards (currently running an Asus B360M-A).
I was also considering using this adapter with a low-profile NIC:
another idea is using the M.2 slot for 10G networking.
IE
also at least one of the M.2 slots on a desktop platform will be CPU connected lanes, which is a plus. lots of secondary/tertiary slots on typical motherboards are chipset fed and could easily bottleneck.
but yea it’s a shame intel/amd only seem to be interested in ever increasing TDP/boost nonsense which is quite disapointing for the rest of us who want a few more pcie lanes on the desktop platforms.
I thought about this, but I currently have both M.2 slots populated with NVME storage (1 for boot, 1 for applications). I suppose I could add a PCI-e card with M.2 on it, but I’ve heard those can cause issues with drives not being detected in Truenas.
You could go my route & use a 10gig nic with a pcie 4.0x1 riser with an open back:
OWC 10gig over RJ45; a Marvell AQC113CS chipset with a modded pcie 4.0x1 riser to add to the jank - works surprisingly well
I think I used something similar to this for the riser. This the one linked here has the benefit of already being open back & not needing to be cut.
(yes I know you only have pcie 3.0, but that just means that the riser will maybe still be useful in the future)
The only ‘problem’ with 10gig over pcie 3.0 is that it’ll be 10gig total, so you can’t do 10gig bidirectional; which with HDDs likely won’t be a real issue. Pcie 4.0 x1 will be pretty close to giving you 10gig up/dn - but once again, irrelevant with the hardware you have.
Probably going to try something like this. Thanks!
Agreed, and would still be a big improvement over Gigabit.
The rest of my network is also still Gigabit, but I’m planning on adding a Mikrotik switch with 10Gig so that multiple clients can connect simultaneously.
I’ve recently learned that there are AQC113CS based NICs that are x1 variants (as it’s designed to be 10Gbe capable on a PCIe x1 4.0 link, for motherboard integration presumably) that exist as a physically x1 card. feel free to search for more though they are less common than the x4 variant and I only found a few.
update I’ve mis-spoke, these cards are PCIe x2 and not x1
pretty sure we all just want motherboard OEMs to stop using closed back connectors, especially since consumer motherboards give you a bunch of useless x1 slots as it is.
