Looking to get some community opinion on HBA Card vs SATA Card vs Motherboard SATA for pool drives. My areas of interest are:
Hardware reliability and features
Software reliability and features
Power consumption
I have a hodge podge of hardware used to setup my truenas server. For instance, I have:
1 NVME drive used to boot directly attached on the motherboard m.2 port.
1 SSD attached via a SATA card (JMB585) that I use as a pool for containers and VMs (not redundant but replicated daily to z1 pool along with regular snapshots),
4 HDDs (210MB/s max sustained transfer rate each, 840MB/s total assuming all at full blast) connected directly to my motherboard in a Z1 pool.
I am considering getting an 8 disk HBA (e.g., LSI SAS3008 9300-8i HBA Controller 12Gbps) and moving the 4 HDDs, and maybe the SSD, to the HBA card. However, I have a cavoite in that my motherboard only has an 8 lane PCI 2.0 port available (I have a PCI 3.0 x16 port but it is occupied with a GPU).
I had a hard time understanding what the motherboard exposes and where it comes from.
As described, your NAS cannot boot.
And I don’t understand what the optical drive is for: Surely you can’t pass it to a VM.
Chipset SATA ports are reliable—but you only have four of them.
SAS HBAs are reliable, but use extra power and require cooling. The caveat about putting a x8 PCIe 3.0 HBA in a x8 (or x16?) PCIe 2.0 slot misses that in any case the real bottleneck is the link between the B450 chipset and the CPU.
Third-party SATA controllers are generally dubious, the clearest case being those which throw in a port multiplier and should then NOT be used with ZFS.
Honestly, the best upgrade would be a motherboard with 6 SATA ports or more… And a better NIC.
Else you could move the boot to a small M.2 NVMe drive on an adapter in the x1 slot, and apps/VMs to the M.2 slot—make full use of your ports before adding a controller.
Or a HBA of course, nothing wrong with that solution, but I’m sure you can find a better AM4 motherboard for the price of a second-hand HBA.
NVME is connected to Motherboard via M.2 connector and is the boot device.
SSD is connected via a PCI 2.0 8x slot with the JMB585 card that I am considering replacing. The SSD is a SATA SSD.
The 4 HDDs are connected to the 4xSATA ports on the motherboard.
It is there because this machine was used to convert our movie collection to a digital format. And you are correct I cannot, at least as far as I can tell, pass it through to a VM. I was hoping I might be able to pass it to a container (e.g., makemkv). But I have not looked into that yet.
Thanks that makes sense.
A better board would be nice. The 1gb nic is okay with video streaming but file transfer is pretty slow with it, so that would be a nice upgrade. I will look at prices for boards to see if I can find something that is reasonable and fits the bill.
Longer term I would like to build a low power version that uses an Intel iGPU for transcoding so that the external GPU can be put to use elsewhere. Maybe eventually going to solid state array.
… mostly. Its a hodge podge as well. but all the critical stuff is backed up and most of the valuable (time wise) but otherwise non-critical stuff is also backed up.
I have 3 4TB drives that I may put to use in a secondary NAS as a backup target that I put at the in-laws house. I also want to switch back to PC gaming (currently play on xbox series X). So I have 1 computing when I need 3 and the 1 I have isn’t great for anything I want to do. Maybe i should just sell it and start over.
Then I’d suggest to look for a suitable Intel board, with Intel NIC and 6-8 SATA ports, and make your current NAS the secondary, as its 4 ports are just enough.