I’m setting up a homelab with TrueNAS and considering using a PCIe adapter for NVMe drives. The model I have in mind is the 4 Port M.2 NVME SSD To PCIe X16 Adapter Converter Card, which supports M.2 SSDs in sizes 2230/2242/2260/2280 and has LED indicators.
My questions are:
Is this type of adapter compatible with TrueNAS? Has anyone used something similar?
Can the NVMe drives on this adapter be configured as part of a ZFS pool?
Do you have any recommendations for reliable brands or stores to purchase such an adapter?
Without a link it’s hard to say, but I’ll assume this is a fairly standard “passive” PCIe card that simply fits into an x16 slot and presents four M.2 sockets.
These cards work fine, as they have no actual circuitry and are effectively just traces on a PCB - but what they require is that the motherboard can support PCIe Bifurcation - your board and chip need to be able to take that single x16 slot and logically “split” it into an “x4x4x4x4” slot.
If your board supports this feature, these cards will work - if it doesn’t, they won’t.
Error 404.
But, as mentioned, the card is not the issue. The issue is whether your CPU and motherboard support x4x4x4x4 bifurcation (Xeon D, Xeon E5, Scalable, Ryzen CPU, no Ryzen APU, no Core, no Xeon E3/E).
@tngxsantos Why not put your proposed spec in your signature and then we can look at the entire context and not just a single card without any context.
This may or maynot be the item you were looking at however as the folks here have been saying, you need a bifurcation support on your motherboard. There are a lot of cards like this on the market, however if your motherboard does not support bifurcation, you would either need to replace the motherboard or purchase a PLX type M.2 adapter card where bifurcation is not required by the motherboard.
To tell you more we will need to know the model number of the motherboard you plan to use.
What’s your use case and what are your requirements?
From what you’ve said (rather low memory but 4*NVMe), and assuming “not too expensive”, that would be either a second-hand Supermicro X10SDV (Xeon D-1500, 6 SATA, 1 NMVe, PCie x16) or an AM4 Ryzen board (preferably the server boards from AsRock Rack X470D4U / X570D4U / B550D4U if budget allows).
Hazzard a guess here, but I’m pretty sure ALL of these cheap NVME cards require PCIe Bifurcation down to 4x4x4x4. Anything that I found that might (maybe) have a PLX chip was above $150.
Lacking proper information on the main board in one of my computers, I bought one of the cheap boards because it was cheap enough to test and find out. The drives were not allowed to bifurcate down to what it needed to work. The PCIe3x4 would have been WAY faster than the SATA I had to chose in the end.
@Greg_E Correct guess, but Intel Core/Xeon E(3) and Ryzen APUs can still bifurcate x8x4x4, which would support three NVMe drives in one of the cheap, passive, adapters instead of four.
After analyzing the MACHINIST-X99 Motherboard Set for my TrueNAS homelab, I see it offers several interesting features like RAID PCIe support, PCIe splitting (X4/X4/X4), and expansion for multiple NVMe SSDs, which would be great for my storage setup. However, I’m a bit uncertain about the best way to use the PCIe slots to configure an appropriate RAID, especially regarding the use of PCIe to M.2 adapters.
Has anyone used this motherboard in a similar setup or can recommend a good adapter that works well with TrueNAS? I’d appreciate any tips or experiences you have!
This will be a home server used as a lab environment for storing VMs, data, and other experiments. It will mostly run TrueNAS, hosting virtual machines and files, with a moderate workload, but not heavily loaded in terms of daily usage, as it’s more for testing and learning.
As for storage, I’m looking at using NVMe SSDs for fast storage, and potentially SATA SSDs or HDDs for bulk storage depending on the capacity needed.
My main goal is to have a reliable system for RAID configuration and efficient handling of virtual machines and data. The budget is moderate, as it’s more about functionality for a homelab rather than enterprise-level performance.
X99? That’s the equivalent of a Xeon E5 v1/2 system. A bit long in the tooth by now, as shown by the SATA 2 ports, but these are enough for HDDs.
Any passive adapter should work.
So, pretty much occasional use, limited number of VMs running at a time, performance useful but not critical.
I still have no idea what your storage needs are, but:
I would guess you will need an i5 or similar and 32GB of memory. I doubt you will need anything more powerful.
Assuming that you can do everything with TrueNAS running native and TrueNAS virtualisation, you should try to find a MB with 2x M.2 NVMe ports (for mirrored apps/VM pool) and (say) 6x SATA3 ports.
Assuming SATA SSDs to be affordable, buy 1 small one as a boot drive and 3x large ones in RAIDZ1 to store other data (allowing you to add another 2 SATA SSD drives of the same size later if your storage needs grow).
Others may have different views, and some may be able to suggest MBs which will meet your needs.
