Thanks for sharing which one is NOT working. At least we know which one to not get to expand the memory. The one that comes with the unit, is this a different brand? Maybe it would be safe to stick to the same brand and model, just with the 32 GB version of it?
Update: There is a HCL on their website that… lists only their own brand: Compatibility Hard to believe that they are manufacturing their own memory modules, but who knows?
Update 2: So their 32 GB module is listed for 200 bucks LOL. Looking at their HCL and searching around, I found this Reddit thread about the F4-424 which is listed in the same line as the F8-SSD regarding the 32 GB module: Reddit - Dive into anything
CMSX32GX5M1A4800C40 was doing the trick for the person in the Reddit thread for the F4-424. Maybe worth a shot. That is a 75 bucks module…
I bought the F8 SSD Plus a while ago as well. The first unit was unfortunately faulty and had issues with one of the M.2 slots being physically damaged, but its replacement arrived yesterday and it’s being put through it paces right now. Some notes:
RMA took about 2 weeks due to holidays. They shipped a new box with all the accessories before receiving the faulty unit, so there was no need to reinstall the drive heatsinks.
The new unit has all slots working well, board revision is V1.1 (first one was V1.0). The fan cable clips are slightly different, but other than that I don’t see any obvious changes. The fans themselves are noticeably less noisy (although both use the same Snowfan YY5010L12S 50mm fans). Most reviews used the V1.1 board.
The internal USB 2.0 port hosts a 4GB pendrive with the bootloader and the TOS kernel + initrd, but it does not exactly spark confidence, so I replaced it with a Samsung Fit Plus 64GB drive. It’s tight in there, but that model fits.
After disabling VT-d, Secure Boot and TOS Boot First in UEFI, TrueNAS 24.10 RC2 boots and installs with no extra surprises. Everything works, performance is great and no kernel command line args were needed - no PCIe errors in dmesg, either.
Right now I’m running it with 4x4TB Crucial P3 Plus drives. Power usage hovers around 18-20W while transferring ~100MB/s from another device, 15W when idling (light torrents, occasional I/O) and 2W when it’s off.
As mentioned above, the M.2 slots on the CPU side are connected to the CPU with a single lane each, while RAM side are behind the ASM2806 PCIe switch. The switch itself is connected with 2 lanes to the CPU, so the disks themselves are not really x1 each if you try to max them out… but in practice, x2 is still more than enough to max out the 10GbE network interface or keep that CPU busy with any I/O-heavy work, so it’s not a big deal.
You replaced it to hold TOS again just in case you want to go back or did you install TrueNAS Scale on it? I ask because from what I´ve read it is not recommended to have TNS on a USB thumbdrive because of the write cycles. I tried OpenMediavault over the weekend and they have a plugin that reduces writes on disk to make it more “compatible” with USB thumbdrives. I wonder if you did change something to make it less demanding on the USB thumbdrive you added?
I installed TrueNAS on the USB drive - it’s not recommended, but there’s no other sensible way to install it other than sacrificing one of the M.2 slots. The USB drive holds just the boot dataset, while the system dataset lives on the NVMe storage, so the plan is just to back up the system configuration to external storage, replace the drive when needed and reinstall TrueNAS from that backup. Data pools should remain intact. That specific Samsung drive can apparently withstand some abuse, we will see how long it lasts. Samsung Bar Plus or SanDisk Extreme Pro could withstand more, but both are too large for this chassis. (The system is reasonably important, but a day of downtime or two is fine.)
I removed the original drive because it’s a 4GB “Generic Flash Drive” that can barely fit the boot dataset, and a quick benchmark suggests it’s… not great. TerraMaster’s official OS basically never writes to this device - it holds just the bootloader + kernel + initrd to bootstrap the system onto fresh drives.
Very interesting @DragoonAethis, I appreciate that very much. I did not plan to fill up the device with NVMes yet and I have a few spare 256GB NVMe lying around from broken laptops, so I plan to use one of those as a boot device in the beginning. But I like the idea to use the USB drive and being able to fully utilize the F8 later on. That samsung sub thumb drive looks interesting and since my F8 will run only a few hours a week anyway, I am tempted to give it a shot too
It could work with an angular extender, but it would have to be just right to make it fit above the heatsink. External ports are all USB 3.0, but then you’re down one easily-accessible port. I want to see how long the USB drive will live first
It has been a couple of weeks since @vimb 's awesome find on how to make TNS work on the F8 SSD Plus. Has anyone had any issues with virtual machines with VT-d being disabled?
I am here from the Unraid community. I had to disable VT-d to get Unraid to boot properly as well. I have @vimb and this thread to thank for showing me the fix!
I just installed Windows 11 and had no issues. After the installation of the OS I installed the VirtIO drivers and so far I do not see anything missing in the device manager and the thing just works. Upgrading Memory on the F8 is something one should do when running VMs in my opinion. Because when I started to use the NAS a bit, the ZFS Cache usage obviously goes up and with running a single Windows 11 VM with 8 GB Memory, barely anything is free anymore. Getting the CMSX32GX5M1A4800C40 is tempting and I would like to know if that one works flawless, but I first have to get my NVMe drives for it
I installed a 48gb DDR5 SODIMM in mine ( CMSX48GX5M1A4800C40) and it works flawlessly. Previous to that, I had a 32gb SODIMM in it (CMSX32GX5M1A4800C40) and it worked great as well.
Oh wow! Awesome! I suppose you did a Memtest run on it too? I get the impression the type / make and size of memory is a Processor / platform thing rather than a BIOS thing. I was shopping for those Topton / CWWK etc. Mini PCs and Mainboards a while ago and following the threads over at ServetheHome, those systems (also with N100 and N-305) seem to be picky about which Memory modules work reliable and despite the manufacturers claiming that 32 GB is max, some people reported positive results with specific 48 GB modules. Let’s see if Black Friday brings the prices down a bit
Haha! This is only because I recently discovered XCP-ng and I am playing with that on an old Dell OptiPlex. That keeps me busy and away from any Onlineshops for now. But it could also be that all that waiting does not pay off for me, because those specific items need to be on sale and who knows… maybe I just wasted time while you had the opportunity to fill up that fresh new space already
Hi folks - just checking back in here with some more experience with the F8 Plus - glad to see it’s working for so many of you!
With VT-d disabled, TrueNAS 24.10 (fresh off the press) works great.
I also had no problem installing and running a VM (Ubuntu 24.04) but of course I was not able to add a PCIe passthrough device - “Unable to determine IOMMU group” error which is exactly what you get without VT-d. USB device passthrough on my VM worked just fine.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen any PCIe errors in the console (I left aspm enabled) - I’ve shuffled around my rather old mixed bag of SSDs so who knows if one of them just had a dodgy controller that had marginal link on some port. Waiting on Black Friday to get a fresh set of SSDs to toss in there and set up for real.
I recently bought a F8 Plus and since SMB is so slow right now in TOS6, and also because TrueNAS has HomeAssistant integration that would allow me to auto shutdown NAS when there is no activity (TOS6 has no hibernation nor auto shutdown feature), i’m very interested in moving to TrueNAS Scale. But it’s very new to me.
Seems to work great with BIOS settings, thanks for your research. However i have two concerns before moving to TrueNAS and having to backup/restore all my datas :
-Does the VT-d disabled option remove the issue of not being able to use more than one NVME on ports 1-4 behind ASM2806 for ZFS pool? (not clear for me if this is still the case).
-Also someone mentioned that GPU should not be impacted by PCIe passthrough absence with VT-d disabled. Has anyone tried for example to use PLEX of Jellyfish with hardware decoding function (which needs direct access to GPU).
Thanks!
If you disable VT-d, then you can fully populate and use all of the NVMe slots without issue
While I haven’t tried it myself, I’m fairly certain GPU access for docker containers (apps) will work just fine - that doesn’t depend on VT-d. GPU passthrough to virtual machines is likely broken.
Forgive me if this is a naive question, but in order for us to re-enable VT-d, does TrueNAS require a new driver or something for the ASM chip in the F8?
Has anyone confirmed if the passthrough for hardware transcoding for Plex will be unaffected by toggling VT-d off?
My F8 SSD Plus is coming tomorrow, and its sole purpose will be a Plex server. From vimb’s response it sounds as if it will work fine, but…since the sole purpose of this NAS, for me, is Plex, its a giant deal if TrueNAS Scale only works if VT-d is off and that breaks hardware transcoding.
