To avoid the process of a Mini-ITX or Micro-ATX build, I would like to purchase a machine that supports at least four NVMe. Does such a device exist that is worth recommending?
Maybe, some high end gamer motherboards (like the 1000+USD range) support 4 NVMe on board.
But for consumer grade CPUs the number of available PCIe lanes is really limited.
YOu can use a PCIe card for this purpose, if:
YOur MoBo has a free x16 PCIe connector
That connector is actually wired up to 16x (and not only 8x or even 4x)
The MoBo BIOS supports PCIe bifurcation, 4x4x4x4x is needed to achieve this.
(otherwise you need to buy a card with an active PCIe switch on it, they exist, but really rare)
In general, my recommendation is to go after a second hand server board with at least 3 PCIe 16x connectors.
You really only provided one specification, four 4TB NVMe M.2 drives.
With that in mind, you could also take a look at doing a Google search for
“TERRAMASTER F8 SSD NAS”. This has had a few reviews on it as well and looks decent. It comes with a 10Gbps port and while I’m not sure how much RAM could be installed, I did see it selling with 8GB and 16GB configurations.
This is worth looking at, as well as the Asustor if you just want to keep it small and simple.
Would these handle TrueNAS? That wasn’t the question so you may be using a different NAS software, which is probably fine too, but something you could consider.
I immediately gravitated toward that, despite the price, until I looked at the specs and realized it won’t come close to the performance the NVMe are capable of. I could live with that if the price weren’t outrageous.
Yes, TrueNas is the only NAS software I’m running, other than Proxmox Backup Server, if that counts. I’ve had a Synology before, and I wasn’t a fan. I do actually have over 10 NetApp machines, that I won as part of an auction, stocked floor to ceiling in my garage. lol, so yeah I’m looking to run something that’s not going to vendor lock me. I see aall of these different brands (Terramaster, Ugreen, QNAP, etc); but I have no idea which ones are proprietary and which ones aren’t.
Unrelated, to the Terramaster, is it accurate that using Thunderbolt with TrueNas can cause problems with ZFS? Aside from the server infrastructure, every device in my home has TB3, 4, or 5.
TrueNAS essentially has no Thunderbolt support. Yes… they may accidentally include it, but its not tested, and there’s no guarantee that it will work with any particular update or not.
As an unofficial comment, this is only partially true. All of the things you said are correct, but if a specific kernel version just so happens to fix those sorts of issues, no one is stopping people…
Also to those that care you can follow something like “kernel release number + thunderbolt issues” in your favorite search provider before upgrading to a TrueNAS release that includes a new Kernel version.
But I wouldn’t personally recommend it for anything other than homelab projects that are more about the journey than the destination. USB4/TB support in Linux is still in it’s infancy. I’m pretty sure macOS was really the only game in down for TB accessories for at least a decade before it got on Linux. Heck, AMD couldn’t even do it until this current gen/first gen DDR5 platform.
Kudos for checking hardware specifications.
But you missed the point that it doesn’t really matter than each drive gets a x1 PCIe 3.0 link: That’s still more than enough to feed a 10Gb/s with small RAID array.
