Are you using the SN770 as a boot drive (assuming you mean 1TB and not 1GB it is very large for a boot drive)? Since your MB supports 4x M.2 I would recommend that you buy another smallest possible NVMe card to use as a boot drive.
Since your MB has 4x SATA ports, I would personally connect your drives to those and not use a PCIe card.
Your MB doesn’t have a PCIe x8 slot BUT it does have 2 PCIe x16 slots (one of which has only 4-lanes) that you can use - so perhaps you should switch back to the LSI 921108i if you still want to use a HBA. (Gaming boards are not typically recommended for TrueNAS but there is no reason it shouldn’t work AFAIK.)
If the installer hangs with the Syba card installed, then install TrueNAS without it installed and then see if TrueNAS can see card and drives if you add them afterwards.
A couple of rules of thumb to remember:
You are only at the beginning of your TrueNAS journey - and you have a lot of decisions to make and configuration to do. So do ask for advice on these.
Better to ask for advice before you do something, rather than after you have committed money or time and effort to something that turns out to be wrong.
So why not do that? Is there a reason you need to use a separate controller card?
No, it doesn’t. You can use a x8 card in a x4 slot. You’ll sacrifice some (potential) performance that way, but four spinners wouldn’t even stress x1 bandwidth, much less x4.
And agree that your boot device is grossly oversized. You know you can’t do anything else with that device, right?
Good afternoon and many thanks for your prompt and comprehensive reply!
The SN770 (and yes, 1TB) was leftover from a different system upgrade so I had it anyway.
I read something in the documentation that a PCI card would be better to use than the onboard controllers. I ordered it when I bought the disk drives.
I got it to work - I put the LSI card into the secondary x16 slot and it works great.
I tried all of the permutations - reinstalled several times with and without the Syba card.
Yes, I know this is a gaming board - I was using it for my old video and music editing machine. I am repurposing it to a household NAS.
And now things get interesting
The mobo has one ethernet port and I wanted to add a second.
The idea would be to have one port going to the WiFi router and then a hardwire connection to my new video/music editing machine.
I put in an Intel 82576 NIC - 2x ports, 1G
I get the same error. It will restart and then hang on Loading initial ramdisk …
I reinstalled TrueNAS with the NIC installed, reboot, same error.
Installed TrueNAS without the NIC, powered down, installed the NIC and same error.
Any ideas.
And yes, I am a mere grasshopper embarking on a long journey.
This software is very deep.
I will be sure to ask for help along the way.
Many thanks for your reply.
I remember somewhere in the documentation that you could get better performance from a dedicated controller than from the onboard controller.
I ordered the card at the same time I got the drives.
And yes, it works great in the x16 slot.
The boot device was something I had on hand - left over from another machine upgrade. I know that most of the capacity is wasted.
I tried installing the OS without the NIC and with the NIC.
Either way, the install went just fine but when it went to reboot, it hung. I let it sit for a good 20-30 minutes seeing if it would resolve but nothing.
Okedokey pointed me to another thread - I’m reading through that.
I have not done any editing of grub install files yet - wanted to check Memory Alpha first before mucking around.
Thank you again for all the great help - Dave K3DGH
Sorry if I missed this above, what version of TrueNAS are you trying to install? I would try to recreate an install USB using balenaEtcher for the latest version (ElectricEel 24.10).
I would also make sure you have the latest BIOS for your mobo.
