Been down the rabbit hole trying to stitch together parts for a super fast storage NAS build. My goal is to have:
5-8x NVME drives for an ultra fast RAID storage pool
25G SFP+ (single or dual) NIC (network)
Truenas compatible
I have looked thousands of threads and guides and I feel lost.
Right now I just found this MOBO and it seems like that it could be the holy grail - if it works with Truenas:
ASUS K14PA-U12 or the ASUS S14NA-U12
They state that:
They supports 5-8 NVME drives (MCIO Gen5x8 (SATA or NVMe) + MCIO Gen5x8 (NVMe)).
They has 2x 25G SFP+ ports
The ASUS S14NA-U12 is cheaper and supports a cheaper CPU series, so that is probably the one to go with even though it supports less NVME drives.
So my questions are:
Will this let me install 5-8x NVME M.2 drives and use them as a RAID storage pool? I don’t really understand what the MCIO connection means in terms of connecting the drives physically and their performance…?
Is it compatible with TrueNAS?
how many rusty 3.5" spinning drives can I use as a backup raid pool?
If this indeed a viable build foundation, then it would be great if anyone could suggest me:
a low power CPU that fits the MOBO and has a onboard GPU - if that is not possible I guess a low power AMD GPU would do.
It’s just a connector… With the x8 variety, you’ll need breakout cables to 2*SFF-8639.
I guess the only question mark is on the Broadcom NIC.
Specifications clearly says eight, with, again, a suitable breakout cable from one MCIO x8 port that is switchable in BIOS between PCIe and SATA.
The other solution is to put a HBA in the PCIe x8 slot, and have as many spinners as you want.
It the board can bifurcate all of its slots and connectors all the way to x4x4x4x4 or x4x4
4 in each of the two PCIe x16 slots;
2 in the PCIe x8 slot;
2 from each of the 5 MCIO connectors;
2 in the two M.2 slots;
so up to 22 NVMe drives at x4 before you bring up a PCIe switch… but you’ll need a boot drive.
There’s no iGPU in the EPYC range (save for EPYC 4000, which are rebranded consumer Ryzen CPU, just like Xeon E3/E are rebranded Core).
“Low power” for EPYC Siena would be 90 W TDP, which is not that bad… but I suspect that it idles at around half of that, which is a lot compared with desktop CPUs.
If you have to ask these questions, I’m not sure it would be wise to go for that kind of hardware.
The first question actually is: What do you want to achieve with the NAS?
