im looking to make a nvme pool for speed and my current case does not have nvme slots. used cases are exepted.
Iām not quite sure I understand what you are asking for. It sounds like you are looking for a computer case, not a āuse caseā.
Assuming you mean computer case, that is not how it works as far as I am aware. NVMe drives are not the same as SATA or SAS drives and they require specific hardware.
You can add up to I think 10 NVMe drives on a single PCIe x16 card, pretty sure that was the largest I have seen. With that said, it completely depends on what kind of capacity and redundancy you need. And how deep your pockets are.
As a warning, Do Not buy a PCIe to NVMe M.2 adapter without reading exactly what you are purchasing. If it is low cost, then odds are it requires a motherboard that support 4x4x4x4 bifurcation.
server case rack mountible
nvme drives are U.3 NVMe Enterprise Solid State Drives so tri-mode broadcome eHBA 9600-24i controller
Does your mainboard support bifurcation? Do you have PCIe x16 slots available?
Then there are carrier boards that take 4 NVME M.2 drives. This is by far the cheapest solution if you donāt need hotswap. If you need hotswap, then it is going to be expensive.
I know about those. u.3 drives do not fit in those.
broadcome eHBA 9600-24i controller is what im going to be using i need a case that supports u.3 drives
Buy at least a 3U or 4U tall rackmount case.
There are 4x PCIe to M.2 cards, that hold the cards vertically, and they don`t fit into a 2U tall case.
Also, you need to pick a motherboard with sufficient amount of 16x slots, that all support 4x4x4x4x bifurcation.
Then you have basically answered your own questionā¦ Look into rackmount chassis with a NVMe or Tri-Mode backplane (or complete systems, possibly used) from Supermicro, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Mitac, etcā¦
Note that, if you can find a pure NVMe backplane, or one which is independently wired for NVMe and for SAS, youāll get a performance uplift from using a PCIe switch over a Tri-Mode HBA.
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That makes a difference as I was thinking M.2.
I wouldnāt put the NVMEās on a sas hba, put that money into a motherboard or case thatās built for NVME.
icy dock makes a bunch of u.2 āsledsā that fit in a 5.25 bay, so you can use them in a bunch of cases.
https://global.icydock.com/products-c5-s47-i0.html
Thereās not much in terms of prebuilt cases, and theyāre expensive.
https://www.aicipc.com/en/productdetail/51556
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/storage/2u/ssg-222b-ne3x24r
well looking at the prices i think i will be going the icydock wayā¦ 6k for supermicro and probably very similar for aicipc option.
I wouldnāt do that. I doubt that the drives get enough cooling in these mounts. And if your drives die due to heat these things get pretty expensive.
Nothing beats a proper rackmount case.
You might want to look for used machines.
AFAIK we donāt have anything approaching tiered storage in Truenas. So we donāt have many options to designate layers like āhotā data which moves frequently vs more static storage that essentially sits there mostly archived. That type of scenario is ideal when you have a pool of super high speed but relatively small storage. The closest we get to this concept is the ARC cache in ram and maybe ram disks.
Essentially Iām kinda asking what the use case is here. I know a lot of people want to find a use for nvme drives in truenas and, beyond slog drives, there really isnāt much. I know with enterprise cloud storage, you can pay extra to get faster storage tiers to host specific stuff that needs speed. So, what is your plan here? How will you be using this special pool? I could see something like an app storage pool specifically for databases under heavy loads, or edge services like a WordPress site.
May I ask the intended purpose of this pool and the expected speed/iops target?
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Modded Minecraft /it benefits from fast storage,
Other game server. and 4k video editing.
anything that exceeds 1k in price will not work.
darn tariffs making everything more expensive
The cheapest solution if your motherboard supports bifurcation, is to just buy a quad nvme pcie card for <$50 and slot in m.2 drives. I know you say u.3, but they arenāt a common format for janky builds.
A lot of people chasing super-fast storage on their home NAS donāt consider network bottlenecks. If youāre planning on editing 4k video from your computer over a 1gbit network connection, I doubt thereās much to gain from an nvme pool. I have rust-based pools that can saturate 10gbit. Unless you have a wild network, or will be editing directly on the server, or are in a multi-user environment + wild network, I donāt think ā4k video editingā will benefit as much as you might be expecting.
For minecraft, I have no idea because I donāt play it, but Iād probably aim for increasing RAM. NVMe would possibly only benefit the initial startup, and afterwards everything would be cached in the much faster RAM.
Motherboards has only 1 pci 16x slot and 2 pci 4x slots as for minecraft i have found it to be very write intensive as it runs in java its ram garbage collection benifits heavily with drive write speed. Slow write speed results in stutering and all around bad time. And arc does not help with writes as its new data not, old data.
OK, my recommendation hasnāt changed.
If you arenāt buying a new mobo, then what @Jorsher recommends is the way. Thereās plenty of pci m.2 adapters that will work for you. The u.2/3 stuff is expensive compared to m.2.
The Kingston DC2000B stuff is reasonably priced, works well, and has PLP.
https://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/DC2000B-data-center-solid-state-drive?capacity=960gb
The ASUS PRIME B760M, has three pcie slots all pcie gen 4, 1 16x slot 1 4x slot and 1x slot
physically they are all 16x wide. the 16x can by bifurcated to 8x,8x but cant do 4x,4x,4x,4x.
HP NC560SFP+ 669279-001 10GB DP SFP+, (lives in pci4 4x slot)
LSI 9300-16i, (lives in pcie4 16x slot)
HP 761879-001 36 Ports 12GB SAS Expander, is (being power separately as they only need power)
pci4 1x slot empty
were would you like me to put the pci4 16x bifurcation cardā¦there is no were to put it. No i cant get ride of the SAS controller it has drives plugged into it.