Adding Dual 512GB NVMEs via an Asus Hyper M.2 V2 Card to my Homeserver
I’ve finally received all the parts in working order and am ready to get started with this step.
I’ve decided on the following SSDs and Adapter Card:
2 * Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 512GB
I bought these SSDs for just 45 Euros each, 90 Euros in Total.
They’re at a great point of price/performance ratio while maintaining good specs:
- 3400MB/s Read, 3200MB/s Write while SLC-Cached
- 512MB of LPDDR4, plus SLC Cache
- 200TBW @ 500GB and reportedly far exceeding it
- 650k/600k IOPS at 4k
Because it’d originally been brought up, the manufacture date of these is April and May 2021, so long before the contamination at the WD / Kioxia facitily.
Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Card V2
I’ve chosen this Card at the price of 40 Euros as it was the only one available. All other Cards are either PCIe 4.0, which I don’t need, or much more expensive because they say Supermicro or Dell EMC on them, while only taking 2 SSDs
This way, I’ve not only saved money but also more options for expansion in the future, at the cost of using my only full x16 PCIe Slot.
The Asus M.2 Adapter Card with the Heatsink Removed:
SSDs have been installed:
The Adapter Card and SSDs, installed in my Server:
How I set it up
Configuring my X10SRM-F for PCIe-Bifurcation
This Process was pretty straight forward, once I figured out that all over the manual Supermicro had written “Bifuraction” instead of “Bifurcation”.
Following these Steps is all what’s needed:
- Enter the BIOS
- Navigate to Chipset Configuration → North Bridge → IIO Configuration → IIO1 Configuration
- Select IIO0 (IIO1 PCIe Port 2) with Enter
- Change to x4x4x4x4
- Hit F4 to Save & Exit
After a Reboot, all the Drives showed up in the BIOS and I booted into TrueNAS Scale.
Adding a ZFS Mirror in TrueNAS Scale
This step could not have been easier.
The OS had immediately recognized the Drives and their properties and I configured a singular ZFS Mirror VDEV with these two drives.
Having left atime and compression off, performance seems quite good with Encryption, but I won’t show any numbers before I get to do proper benchmarks.