Can someone recommend PCIe card to house nvme drives?

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
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I’m going to be building a new PC based on the Gigabyte X570 Master. I keep delaying the build as I try to work things out.

One thing I’ve been trying to work out is where to store my email. I use Thunderbird on my current PC and the email is stored on a couple of mirrored hard disks. I’ve implemented a FreeNAS box to store files and don’t want to mirror the hard disks in the new PC as rebuilding takes ages.

As I will only have one free PCIe slot on the X570 and no free Sata ports, I have been thinking of buying a new card for the free PCIe slot.

I can’t decide whether I should buy a card to support some 2.5" SSD’s that I have lying around of whether I can get a card that will allow me to add some nvme drives.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should do/buy?

Also does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to backup Thunderbird email? Should I mirror some nvme/SSD drives or is there a better way?

At the moment I’m still using Pop3 but I’m thinking of fetching my email (from various servers) onto a new server and then accessing it from there using IMAP on all my devices. I’ve never done anything like that before so not sure of the best thing to do?

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Your build seems… Confused. An X570 Master is way, waaaaaay overkill for a NAS build, suggesting a workstation build + NAS build. However, such a build removes quite a few of the reasons to have NAS in the first place (like having storage in another part of the building in case of, you know, fire).

I can understand the need for lots of storage in a workstation, but I’d seriously consider getting a NAS as well in that case (and make that a priority).

That said, the ASUS Hyper m.2 x16 gen4 add-on card allows for up to four NVMe drives, do note you need 16 PCIe lanes to properly take advantage of this card. :slight_smile:

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Slightly disagree, if you need more pcie lanes and better quality VRM since its going to be on 24/7 365

10gbe and HBA = you want to be able to split GPU lanes. You could run some through the Chipset but depending on load you could have issues. So generally yes but you could 100% need the bifurcation of the 16x in a build .

What are your exact needs / uses for the build?

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A regular backup process does the job. Make sure that your backup includes %APPDATA%\Thunderbird if on Windows. $HOME/.thunderbird on Unixish.

Except MacOS, I am not sure where Thunderbird puts its files there.

If you definitely never want to lose any email then you will need at least RAID-1 mirrored drives. And a backup process, of course.

You can also look into various options for leaving email on the server for a limited amount of time, so that if your drive fails and your backup is a day old, you have the option of downloading the email again.

I, personally, run my own email system with IMAP and I tell Thunderbird to not download email. It fetches it from IMAP as needed. The IMAP store is on RAID-1 mirrored Ironwolf SSDs. I upgraded to these away from hard disks because email operations are almost entirely synchronous, so hard drive operations slow everything down.

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For backing up Thunderbird you can simply copy your entire profile folder. Another option is to just backup the POP3 accounts (Thunderbird puts them inside a subfolder named “Mail” inside your profile folder) and export your contact list. The advantage of doing it the second way is that sometimes TB is a bit special when you try to restore a profile to a newer TB release (in case the unthinkable happens and you have to rebuild your TB profile).
As for the best way to do it, it depends on how large your email accounts are.

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Hi wertigon,

You misunderstood my post. The X570 is not the NAS. I have an HP box for FreeNAS. The X570 is for my new main PC.

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The PC is for general use, development, graphics, video work etc. The main reason I delayed the build is because of all the new graphics cards.

One thing I’d really like to do is run a lot of virtualised operating systems and I can’t work out how to do this with the graphics card. AMD and Nvidia both tell me I need a pro card to do this but I haven’t found any documentation on how to do it and the pro cards seem to lack bang for the buck.

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take a look at lookingglass on the forum, youll need 2 gpus thos

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Ah, I see. Then my follow up question is, what’s with all that fast NVMe storage? Since you’re getting an Aourus X570 Master, that suggests a build with quite a big budget - big enough to fit a $170 2TB SSD extra storage device in there. That is quite a lot of storage especially if you have a NAS around as well.

Now there are use cases where NVMe PCIe x16 cards make sense, just not convinced you really need that fast storage for now, especially as the Master already has 3 NVMe slots available on the card. Your build and your money in the end though! :slight_smile:

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Yes you need a GPU that has SR-IOV enabled, this is only available on the Nvidia Quadro and AMD Pro WX cards. Those are for “professional” use and are quite expensive no bang for the buck there.

What you haven’t told us yet is the OS you are going to use. because in case of Linux you could just set up a simple cron job with rsync and backup the TB files to any amount of drives you want.
In Windows I think it’s a little more complicated though not by much I wager.

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Thank you for the info.

I’m afraid it is Windows 10 as I have so much Windows software.

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I can only use 2 of the NVMe slots as I need 6 sata. I use the FreeNAS box as my main backup and I’m having to run it over slow network via the mains so it isn’t great to access files directly.

My priority isn’t the speed for the storage. I’m more interested in reliability although I’ve never seen any reports of reliability of SSD/NVMe versus hard drive. But my music collection sits on hard drives and I’ve suffered problems where albums or tracks from albums are suddenly missing.

I couldn’t decide whether to spend out for a card to make use of some of my spare ssd’s or use an NVMe card. That really is my main question. Whichever I use my email will also sit on there and I’d like that to be fast. On my current set-up Thunderbird sometimes seems to be quite slow.

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Hard drives isn’t the issue here, it’s the lack of hashing algorithms in your file system. I would recommend a NAS running some sort of Linux/UNIX and ZFS or equivalent, as well as ECC RAM and six 8 TB harddrives. That keeps you reasonably protected while offering a metric shit-ton of storage for the low price of 16.6666% less capacity (40 instead of 48 TB).

HDDs are great at one last thing, and one thing only; cold storage. So if you only spin them up every once in a while, they should last for decades. Even then, do not forget to make regular backups. Oh, and programs like iTunes love to consolidate your collections every once in a while, helpfully removing all song clones from your folder, so that might also be a culprit. :slight_smile:

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That is why I have the FreeNAS box (ZFS and ECC ram) although I plan to upgrade to a newer box sometime as my current box only has 4 bays.

I thought hard drives suffered from bit rot?

Would never let iTunes anywhere near my music!

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Bit rot is a thing, but it occurs on every storage media known to man. Even DVDs. ZFS and similar filesystems trade performance for data integrity - they look at your files and repair them if corruption is detected.

No need to get offended, was just pointing out some popular media players pull that kind of shit. Make sure your isn’t one of them, it’s more common than you think. :slight_smile:

Anyway, if you need to upgrade your NAS housing, I tend to recommend the U-NAS NSC-810A for a good diy HDD NAS case.

As for workstation storage, my logic is this:

NAS Available? Need > 8TB locally? Advice
No No Get one or two 2TB SSDs
No Yes Get a 2TB SSD and a couple of large HDDs
Yes No Get one or two 2TB SSDs
Yes Yes Go full (NVMe?) SSD solution

Reason being, a NAS on a 1GB connection is enough to saturate a single mechanical harddrive, and a RAID10 setup will saturate a 2.5GB connection. In other words, you will not gain much by having an HDD in your workstation, if you already have a NAS. NVMe is nice, but you only need one for the boot drive right now. :slight_smile:

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Honestly, it sounds like you need a workstation board, if you want that kind of local storage. Alas, there aren’t much in the way of AMD-powered solutions available. Storage-wise, there is still the option of a SAS, or SATA HBA card. Icy Dock have solutions for both SSD and M.2 storage medium.

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Not offended. I just find it really funny that people actually use iTunes to manage their music. I equally hate J River (or whatever it is called) as I installed it once and it started scanning all of my files without asking. It even started indexing images and all sorts of stuff. I’ve used iTunes to transfer my music to iPods but never let it near my main music collection. Personally I hate any program that thinks it is better at making decisions about my data than I am. Programs that scan looking for errors and then advise of them are great but programs that just go messing with stuff I find so annoying.

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You lost me there. My FreeNAS box has mirrored USB flash drives for boot and WD Red disks. The disks are 4TB as I didn’t want to spend on more expensive drives and that gave me enough storage for now.

My new PC will have 2 NVMe drives. One for Windows and one for programs. It will then have 4 hard drives for videos etc. from my current PC.

The network to the FreeNAS box is over the electric cables so I guess it is no more than 100Mb but I’ve never tested it.

My only issue is where to put my email. At the moment two of the hard drives in my main PC are mirrored but I don’t want to do this in the new build as I want the extra storage back.

So, I either buy a PCIe card to make use of my current spare SSD’s and mirror them, or I buy a card for some NVMe drives. The size of my email is only about 50MB so the cost of some NVMe drives would not be that much.

Either way, I’m looking for suggestions on what PCIe board to buy.

I already have the X570 Master, CPU, memory etc. The only things I can’t decide on are the graphics card to buy and the raid board.

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I see. Hmmm…

Before I present my findings, I again just want to point out if four HDDs are all you’ll ever need, the simple solution is to leave two SATA ports disabled and go for a third NVMe. That said:

Let’s see, there are three ways to go here. The X570 has 36 PCIe lanes available (20 from CPU, 16 from chipset). The X570 Aorus Master divides these as follows:

  • 1 x PCIe 4.0 x16 slot with 16 lanes from CPU
  • 1 x PCIe 4.0 x16 slot with 8 lanes from CPU (shared with first slot, so both become x8)
  • 1 x PCIe 4.0 x16 slot with 4 lanes from chipset
  • 1 x PCIe 4.0 x1 slot with 1 lane from chipset

Of course, this assumes Ryzen 3xxx or above, 2xxx gets PCIe 3.0 because reasons (same splits though). Anyhow, three ways:

  1. NVMe add-on card
  2. 2.5" SATA PCIe modules
  3. SATA add on card.

Now, seeing as you can get at most 8x PCIe lanes for your card, unless you want to run a GPU at 4x the speed, a card like the ASUS Hyper m.2 x16 gen4 I linked earlier is pretty much dead in the water, but it depends on your priorities. This of course means you leave PCIe slot #2 completely depopulated. A more interesting approach might be something like the RIITop NVMe adapter though, which is fairly cheap for a third NVMe. Or an Icy Dock m.2 hotswap card might work too if you have the budget!

As for the second option, those are quite interesting as well, and even allow you to put a 2.5" mech in there, should you choose to do so. Check out the ICY DOCK 2.5” SATA SSD/HDD to PCIe 2.0 x1 Hot-Swap Mobile Rack for hot swappable capabilities that use the PCIe bus, or why not fit TWO SSDs on one?

For the third option, just get a cheap SATA controller card and be done with it. This one seems decent enough, I guess. The bonus is that this card also allows you to use all four PCIe ports, but if that isn’t relevant to you you could always mount a couple more SSDs in a PCIe mounting bracket…

Hope that made the options a bit clearer! For my recommendations I’d probably go for the 2-SSDs-On-A-Card solution, but yeah, you go for what you like!

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