In my NAS box, I currently have 4 drives connected to the chipset SATA controller. I intend to eventually get an 8-port HBA. Would I be able to move the drives from the MB to the HBA card without losing the data?
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Short answer yes.
Longer answer yes, as long as the chipset SATA controller is not using any builtin RAID, (aka not ZFS RAID…). ZFS does not generally care about how a drive is connected.
Occasional problems occur when using a HBA, SAS Expander and external drive tray. It has to do with drive readiness at the time TrueNAS attempts to import pools. If the drive is not ready, pool can’t be imported. Should not be a problem for an 8 port HBA.
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Good to know. In my case, the 8 (technically 9) bays are all internal, but it only fits an ITX board, which caps out at 4 ports. That’s more than enough for now, but I wanted to avoid problems should I decide to spin up a second pool.
Out of curiosity, what’s the case?
There are a few mini-ITX boards with 8 ports or more. Supermicro A2SDi-H boards provide 12 ports.
Yes, I’ve done this myself and encountered no problems. As long as your new controller is supported, you shouldn’t have any issues.
Jonsbo N3. I was looking for an AM5 motherboard that I could buy from a Canadian supplier, so that constrains my options quite a bit.
Hmm… “Deep” mini-ITX may not fit
AM4 model will fit and has 8 SATA:
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X570D4I-2T#Specifications
There are Intel boards as well (C246, C256, C262/C266 to keep with ECC-enabled boards). Available from a Canadian supplier is another issue.