PCIe NVMe SSD for ASRock E3C226D2I Upgrade

I thought I’d post this for others using an ASRock E3C226D2I motherboard.

History:
Created a FreeNAS 9.3 Server in 2017 using the motherboard with 6 x 4TB Western Digital Drives. 16GB Memory
The Boot drive was a 16GB USB Stick.

After many year of the server working well it started getting intermittent errors requiring a reboot. (I thnk the USB drive finally gave out.)

The ASRock board only has 6 SATA ports which were already being used to host a ZFS Pool (Unencrypted)

I took the plunge and decided I would leave the ZFS Pool intact and install a new installation of TrueNAS SCALE.

First Attempt:
Installed to a new USB Stick and successfully imported the old pool using the web gui.
The installation wasn’t very happy and I believe TrueNAS now recommends that you DO NOT use USB sticks as boot media.

Second Attempt:
The ASRock board doesn’t have any M.2 NVMe ports so decided to TRY installing a M.2 NVME drive in the existing PCIe x16 port using a PCIe care to M.2 adapter.

At first the BIOS did not recognise the M.2 drive… So I updated the ASRock bios using Instant Flash to 3.50 which did the trick and I could now see the M.2 drive.

I repeated the TrueNAS Scale install onto the 500GB M.2 Drive and set it as the Boot drive. During the install TrueNAS also created a 16GB Swap Partition.

Everything went smoothly and I was able to import the previous pool suing the Web Gui and then recreate my SMB Shares. (You need to create a local user first).

Amazingly everything worked and the system has been rock solid.

New Parts added to the system.
Added SABRENT M.2 NVMe SSD to PCIe x16 Tool-Free Add-in Card (AIC) with Aluminum Heatsink, M.2 PCIe Adapter for Gen5 SSDs PCIe 5.0, Backwards Compatible with Previous PCIe Generations (EC-TFPE)

Added Silicon Power 500GB UD90 NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 SSD R/W up to 5,000/3,850 MB/s (SP500GBP44UD9005)

Thought it might help anyone else with the same board as it was widely used for FreeNAS installs.

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