SATA SSDs vs NVME PCIe expansion card

TrueNAS General
1

Hey there. I’ve got TrueNAS (Scale) running on a Consumer board (Asus TUF B760M Plus II) with 3x NVME slots.

I am using

  • 1x NVME for a 128GB boot drive
  • 2x NVME for 2TB WD RED NVME for a zfs pool used for apps, etc

Now I want to add another pool for media files (for plex or jellyfin) with 2x 4TB ssd drives. I don’t have free nvme slots left but I do have free PCIe slots (1 x PCIe 5.0, 1 x PCIe 4.0 x4, 1 x PCIe 3.0 x1). So I was wondering what would be the better setup

  • 2x WD RED SATA SSD 4 TB (520-560 MB/s RW)
    or
  • 2x WD BLACK NVME SSD 4 TB (6700-7000 MB/s RW)
  • 1x PCIe expansion card with at least 2x M.2 slots (e.g. Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 Card)

I don’t know how much PCIe speed my current nvme drives are using up and if there would be any left to utilize the full speed of nvme drives vs sata. Any suggestions?

2

For the two applications, video is slow so the SATA connected drives would work very well.

1 Like
3

Adapters are cheap.
A x1 slot is perfect fit for the boot drive.
A x4 slot may take one drive.
And a x16 slot could take three (Intel, AMD APU) or four drives (AMD CPU); check bifurcation options in BIOS.

1 Like
4

4K video has a maximum bit rate of about 128 Mbps from a Blu-Ray (some are as low as 35, but some go to 75-85 streamed)

SATA SSD will do 500 MBps or 4000 Mbps

You can get 30 streams of the highest off SATA SSDs - heck most people use HDs for media and are fine

Is 4TB going to be enough would be my question

1 Like
5

[quote=“Alister, post:4, topic:50531”]
Is 4TB going to be enough would be my question
[/quote]Haha I would go higher but thats too expensive for SSDs. I tried using hard drives but the NAS is in my room and I can’t stand the constant noise from them. With SSDs it’s completely silent.

Thanks for all the replies. I guess I’ll go for SATA then.

1 Like
6

Does your motherboard/BIOS support PCIe bifurcation? If not, this won’t be an option.

Serving media isn’t likely to use anywhere near the throughput of a SATA SSD–I serve it from spinners without an issue. So if the SATA SSDs cost less, that’s the easy answer. If the NVMe SSDs cost less, including whatever adapter is needed to make them work, then use those.

1 Like
7

The fact that you are asking makes me think that you do not already have a lot of video content on hand. When you RIP your video content (legally of course) then you will have a file size. If you rip Blu Ray, you are looking to create very large files. Do you need it to be this quality? My answer is no, but you can still get very good quality at half the file size, or less. These are things you should know before setting up a storage size.

However, if I wanted to build a library then No, 4TB is not enough, it is far from enough. As others have said, spinners are the more economical way to go. You can buy a pair of 20TB drives and mirror them, then store a lot of video content and much more. If you don’t care about redundancy then a single 20TB drive, or Stripe two 20TB drives for 40TB of storage. My numbers are a generalization, not to be taken literally.

8

My primary system if you’d checked has

Data Drives 2: 6 x 14TB WD Red Pro RAIDZ2

which should be enough info to tell you the size of media collection

(As a hint - the backup of the music alone is done on a 4TB as I converted to FLAC/ALAC)

9

I know about all the huge hard disk/spinner configs you can do, but I tried it with those and they are too loud. My NAS is right behind me and I can’t stand the constant rattling of the drives. With SSDs its now completely silent.

10

I have that card. Study up on “bifurcation”. It will save you pain and discontent.

Asus does not list your mobo in their compatibility FAQ for that card: [Motherboard] Compatibility of PCIE bifurcation between Hyper M.2 series Cards and Add-On Graphic Cards | Official Support | ASUS Global