Onboard and PCIE disk controller or 2x PCIe controllers - performance increase?

TrueNAS General
1

So I’ve been having problems with my Truenas with, I think a bad cable or bad onboard controller. I have 2 controllers, PCIE and onboard that I’m using, it’s a dell t340.
I wondered if I bought another LSI PCIE controller card, and plugged my 5x14tb drives into that, instead of the on board controller they are currently using, would I get a performance increase? ( I might end up doing this anyway if the onboard is the issue I’m having)
I’m tying to work out if the onboard controller would be faster as it wasn’t plugged into the PCIE bus.
The PCIE bus at present has a 10gb network card, and existing controller card, and a 4 port ethernet card. I was going to remove the 4 port card and replace it with a new / extra controller card.
Would I be putting too much load on the PCI bus, that I’d actually get a performance reduction?
Due to the bays in the server, I’d never run more than 6 drives off the “new” PCIe controller.
if so, are there any particular cards you’d recommend, cheap, ones even ebay ones.
Thanks

2

What errors are you getting?

Some notes/thoughts on your setup

  • The DELL HBA330 uses a LSI 3008 chipset already
  • I’d look into getting something like a MikroTik 10GB Switch CSS318-16G-2S+IN and doing away with the direct cable & 4 port
  • What are you booting from?

You have 2 slots that are Gen3 x8 electrical plus a Gen3 x4, you you have enough for 2 x HBA and 1 10GB

3

Hi Alister,

Thank you for your advice. It made me have another look at the mother board, and to my great joy I found that there was 1 remaining sata port on the mother board.

The mother board has a mini sas connector that I was using for 4 14tb drives, and 1 on board I was using for the boot ssd. But I wanted to add another drive as I wanted Raidz1, but only had the ports for raid0, given the capacity requirements.

I can now use the “extra” port I found to run the extra disk, and now have a raidz1 arrray.

I know there can be a performance drop on sata drives marked for the cdrom, but I looked around and found an article where a chap had asked dell if there was a difference and they’d said there wasn’t.

So now I have everything I wanted.

However you are right regarding another controller. I have 1 remaining bay in the case, that is run by dells HBA, when that’s gone I will need to look at a controller card that can run the drives outside of the case.
I’ve seen 3d prints for external cases, and a have a spare PC power supply so I may print a case and extend it to contain the PSU, but thank you for making me look again