My motherboard has 3 pci express 3.0 slot: 16x, 4x, 1x.
Now:
LSI 9300 series I’ve excluded for power consumption issue.
9211 series been working at pci 2.0 4x in my movo could be working too much on the edge…moreover that from “art of server test” the real bandwidth of that controller even if plugged in 8x slot is 1700MB/s that is more or less my theoretical maximum with 8HDD…and I would like to have a bit of room…
Choice is between 9500-8i and 9400-16i. 9400-16i I would prefer for cost and number of connections: but the only one I find is Lenovo 430-16i. And now I arrive to the point.
I suspect that it is too late because you already have the components… but the best choice would have been a motherboard with 8 SATA ports and no HBA. (Keeping your DDR4 ECC UDIMM: AsRock Rack E3C246D4U2-2T and Core i3-9100 or Xeon 2100/2200.)
Is not too late because I bought everything on Amazon and pack still not arrived, I can easily send back.
I don’t understand: it’s written everywhere in every guide to NOT use motherboard SATA ports, and buy instead HBA….now is changed ?
HD is maximum 8W per HD. Even considering 10W is 80W HDDs. 65W CPU. Consider other 50W between motherboard ram and fans. We’re less than 200W. And exactly in the sweet spot of PSU pfc factor. How 450W psu is not enough ?
I3 9100 doesn’t have ram ECC and Xeon 2100 is not easy to find here.
The i3 9100 does support ECC. And you will never reach 1700MB/s anyway. Also your chosen motherboard has only 2.5G ethernet and its a wonky realtek chip.
The motherboard @etorix recommendet is a much better choice.
I’ve a proxmox application server with intel cpu and latest arc iGPU. I just need a pure smb filesharing server with the maximum protection on the data ( raid Z3)
Also remember that link aggregation doesn’t add (as an example) 2 * 1Gb link together to make 2Gb). Its still 2 seperate 1 Gb links. Each client will use one of the links. So a client will still be limited to 1Gb. A second client may or may not use the same link but is still limited to 1Gb. You cannot really control which client uses which link
Link aggregation only really works to increase available server bandwidth with a large number of clients. It does however provide some redundancy if one link fails.
In the case I keep using the gaming motherboard (maybe with and intel 2.5gbit pci express) …which problem you think it could create ? Important for me is to not have any data loss on the ZFS pool…I’m trying to have the biggest reliability on my data
No, it’s not.
As has been mentioned HBA is recommended if you want to virtualise TrueNAS.
HBAs are also recommended if you don’t have enough ports and you need to get some form of expansion card. In this case HBA are recommended over SATA cards.
In other words, if you are not virtualising TrueNAS and you have enough motherboard ports for the drives you want to use, there’s no reason to use an HBA. In fact, doing so needlessly complicates the setup by adding one more thing that needs to be configured (and that can fail) not to mention the additional cooling need/power usage.
In that case I would recommend ECC RAM as one layer of protection. Also, if this system will be your fileserver, where you store your files, it’s not really a backup. While ZFS is a good choice when it comes to data integrity, it’s not magic. Sometimes unexpected things happen that can result in total pool loss, for example external factors or straight up user error.
To protect against that the recommendation is to have multiple copies of your data. A single system that holds all your data does not fulfil that role by itself.
Using consumer hardware has its caveats. One is crappy realtek NIC chips. These gaming boards are not built for 24/7 operation and heavy i/o through the NIC.
You dont want wifi and RGB on a NAS either.
The Synology/QNAP ZFS systems also dont use gaming components.
A prebuilt QNAP seems to be a sensible choice given your situation.
Mind you, that does not change the second half of my previous post, the bit about the NAS not being a backup all by itself.
Consider for a moment what would happen if you accidentally delete all your files because you were tired and messed up? Or if you get caught on the network cable going to the server, tripping and pulling the entire NAS from 5 feet up straight into the floor? Or your basement suddenly got flooded for whatever reason. Don’t keep a single copy of data you can’t afford to lose.
