The question simply is if a card like this 16-port card or this 6-port one would work for a Plex Server or are they specific for Chia mining and simply not work with a FreeNAS solution? I know HBAs are the correct choice but I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too if I can.
These are straight from aliexpress and worked plug and play on a windows chia farming setup from a client and now he’s selling them after giving up on chia.
I linked these two specifically because I can buy these right now from an ex-farmer of chia who has these two cards working perfectly for ~30 dollars each. Literally nothing mission critical is to be stored here, just Anime and Wii ISO hoarding for Dolphin.
I already got some of the latter 4TB hard drives he bought, for dirt cheap and after stress testing them with Ultimate Boot CD they seem to be in good condition, HBAs are crazy expensive in Brazil and I can’t count on ebay here.
I would search Ebay for a Dell Perc H310 and either flash the firmware to “IT Mode” or find one already flashed.
many of which on ebay are already flashed.
They can be found for about the same price.
$30-40 USD
I got one and I’m using it in my TrueNAS/PLEX server
I can’t recommend that product. PCIe x1 2.0 is choking your bandwidth quite considerably. 512MB/s gross bandwidth can’t even handle a single SATA SSD or more than two HDDs without a bottleneck. Which is fine for Chia, but very limited for pretty much everything else.
For PLEX video streaming, bandwidth isn’t important. But you may find common maintenance tasks like scrub, resilver, balance or altering the disk configuration by expanding or removing disks to the array, rather underwhelming.
If you’re absolutely certain that you don’t need more than two disks at the same time (well because e.g. you don’t run a RAID configuration despite having multiple disks), it’s probably a good deal, especially when normal HBAs are hard to get/ very expensive. I’d still go for a cheap “RAID card” or equivalent with “proper” PCIe bandwidth to be more flexible in what you can do with those HDDs/ports (in the future).
Can’t say anything about it working in general, but be aware that even if it does, consider the limitations mentioned above.
As I said, ebay is not an option in Brazil, shipping often costs as much as the purchase, and that is if I don’t get taxed for importing things. But I’ll keep that in mind and if I by some miracle find one in Brazil, I’ll buy it!
Thanks, coverd a lot with that answer, I’ll probably get the cheapest one so I can free up 2 motherboard Sata ports and use the expansion cards for the DVD/Blu-ray readers if the cards work with them and they don’t give me trouble.
Guess I’ll keep saving some money for a good HBA and a new chassis in the future and not waste money on these.