Using sata expansion cards

TrueNAS General
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Does anyone know if this will work nicely with truenas?

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For the same price :slight_smile:

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This type of Sata expansion card is not recommended.

This one has a ASM1166 chip which offers 6x SATA, so at least there seems no port multiplication.

But still, go for a HBA in IT mode + fan.

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I have a Dell perc H200 (in IT mode) already just wondering the a sata pci would be better

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The perc is what you want.

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That card looks pretty similar to one that I bought from Amazon at the end of last year. So far it seems to be working well although I did have a mystery freeze up the other day.

I have TrueNAS running as a VM under Proxmox with the card passed through to it. Proxmox then backs up my other VMs to a TrueNAS NFS share. For some reason the backup got stuck and Proxmox became unresponsive. Whether or not that was due to the card or something else in my bodged together system I don’t know.

I’d prefer to be using the HBA that I bought but after finding out how hot they get sticking it in a MS-01 didn’t seem like the best idea.

What I can say is that it’s certainly running better than when I was using a 5 bay usb enclosure…

Edit: I should also add that TrueNAS takes around 10 minutes to boot now.

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I have one of these ASM1166 cards in my system. It seems to work fine, though my use of it is limited: I only have 4 SATA drives plugged into the motherboard’s SATA ports, so this card is connected to four empty bays. I occasionally plug in an additional SATA drive, which I then backup to with a backup script, and then I unplug it and store it safely away. This way I can use full-size SATA drives for backups instead of portable USB drives. So far, I haven’t noticed any problems, or even any significant extra power usage, so I’m quite happy with it. I’m not sure why so many people complain about these cards. It supports advanced C-states, it doesn’t use a port expander, and it isn’t using one of the infamous JMicron chipsets.

Note, this card has a PCIe x 4 connector, and uses 4 PCIe lanes, so you’ll need a slot at least this large. For many mATX motherboards, that may mean the x16 video slot is the only one possible.

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The complaints aren’t due to that fact that they aren’t functional, but more so due to when (if) something goes wrong then the chances of revocery get reduced based on previous posts.