HBD Card vs SATA Card vs Motherboard SATA

Hi All,

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).

Input would be appreciated.

I had a hard time understanding what the motherboard exposes and where it comes from.
As described, your NAS cannot boot. :stuck_out_tongue:
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.

I hope you have a backup of this raidz1 pool.

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.