This is one of the reason I liked the board. They also sell a 4x1 card made specifically for this motherboard. So I think it is more like native support for 2x2/4x1 than just buying some third party adapter and hoping it works.
I’ll take your inputs and reconsider all the options…
The issue was probably you didn’t change the system dataset off the boot pool to somewhere else, so there was a lot more writing going on to it.
With a mirrored USB boot pool I only needed to replace a drive every 9-12 months. The difficulty getting the old drive out of the USB port because it was so tiny and the port gripped it so tight was the biggest hassle for me
Does anybody have experience with a SATA controller with a ASM1166 chip as pictured bellow?
(this is not just a simple SATA port multiplier)
It will either be this or a proper HBA. However, I would like to avoid an HBA because they are pretty power hungry from what I have read. If I need to go with an HBA, does anybody have a recommendation for one that is not super power hungry, works with Gen3x2 (m.2 or regular pcie slot) and has 4-8 SATA ports (I will probably only use 4 SATA ports).
(at about 3.5USD/Watt/Year, adding an additional 15W power draw would cost me over 400 USD extra over an 8 year life span of the NAS, hence I’m trying to avoid adding any power hungry devices)
Actually I did move the system dataset to a pool to keep the pressure off them. Something was strange there because despite truenas rejecting those thumb drives, I could pull them and format in windows and 90% of the time they worked just fine.
Well, TrueNAS is running ZFS scrubs on the content and finding issues with the media that way isn’t it? I don’t expect that Windows is doing any rigorous testing like that. It would just become an issue of files you put on them silently corrupting because it’s not doing checksuming of the data when it copies to/from it.
I could have tested this recently as I just did a secure wipe off a half-dozen old USB sticks used on TrueNAS, but it didn’t seem worth the effort.
They are utter garbage and tend to go up in smoke during resilvers and scrubs.
I like the LEDs,
you can immediately see when something isn’t right, before any real problems occur.
I’m sure it also includes a magic smoke indicator 
I might give it a try for some non crucial storage…
It’s not a problem at all for me?
Core/BSD was nice, but Linux has more/better virtualization/container software and that extra code takes the extra minute during updates.
I deal with Windows updates, so less than 5 min is no big deal at all.
Just to share, i have a couple of what I think are the same drive you have, INTEL MEMPEK1J016GAL, and they seems not supporting smart at all. Considering that i bought them on AliExpress for 3€ each i don’t give to much importance to that, i just keep one spare ready to use in case of needs.
With a X1 pciex adapter - 1 lane they run almost as sata3 SSD, so quite better than use usb, but stay away from too cheap adapter they can make a lot of damage
Same. Initially I was running Open Indiana (Solaris code)
Had 2 Samsung FIT USB 3 mirrored for the boot drive.
The first drives lasted 2, 3 years and at some point I moved to FreeNAS.
USB boot drives started to die yearly. At some point I moved the system dataset to a HDD.
Ended settling in USB 3 SSD as I want to idle 100% of my HDDs.
Worse case is 10 minutes to replace failed boot SSD with TN preloaded SSD, apply updates, reboot, apply latest config, reboot.
My TN systems with apps/VMs running (vs system backups only) do have proper quality SSD/Nvme drives for them, but I do have a couple secondary app/VM systems with external USB 3 or USB C SSD/Nvme boot drives. Used in case primary app/VM system motherboard or power supply die. Gets replicated data from primary, so it’s easy to bring everything back up in secondary. Put them to sleep most of the time, up a few hours a day to get replication data.
Poor’s man HA, but it works for me.
(I have a daily script that downloads the configuration files from all the systems, so I don’t worry about losing changes done since last update when they forced you to save a config backup).
The latest chipsets work fine.
Heat is the problem with heavy data transfers.
Get a small fan and/or proper heatsink, but depends on your usage. Use a temperature gun to check max temperatures.
Yeah, it can be the case.
Yeah, this is the best advise. As long as you keep regular backups, the bootdrive is a bit irrelevant. I used an old ps4 harddrive (or ps3?) I found in a box of spare parts.
Definitely use that nvme for apps! I also don’t have my app drive mirrored, but I make daily backups to my main storage pool.
