TL;DR: Has anyone tried hammering all 8 SATA ports on an X570 board continuously? Is it stable or does funky shit happen?
Long version:
We need a reliable, relatively high performance, but also high capacity NFS file server, as cheap as possible. I am currently considering an AMD 3600, 32GiB of ECC RAM and an Asrock X570 board with 8 SATA ports, an M.2 SSD for the OS and 8 SATA HDDs (8-10 TB each).
The software side would be some flavor of Ubuntu LTS and ZFS with LZ4 compression on but dedupe off, the disks would be mirrored pairwise.
As far as I can see, this looks good on paper, but I am a bit worried about hooking up 8 SATA devices to the X570 chipset, it seems like a good way of triggering some corner cases, as alsmot nobody these days uses all 8 SATA ports in a desktop, especially not in a single array…
If you don’t get a definite answer for your question, you could also consider the fact that the price difference between a decent B450 board and an X570 board is about the same price as a good 9211-8I/9207-8i based HBA card.
Yeah, I have been thinking about getting an LSI 8 port HBA, but after reading some reviews, those also seem to come with some headaches, they are really designed to have the airflow of a “proper server” over them, and some people seem to be having overheating issues with them.
Myself and a few other users on here and elsewhere haven’t had a bad experience zip-tying a 40mm fan to the heatsink. Keeps them warm to the touch, rather than burning hot.
Understandable if you don’t want a slightly jerry rigged card in something mission-critical though haha
On a second look, I think I might have been looking at the RAID cards, not the much simpler, and presumably lower power HBAs.
For example the 9207-8i that you recommended seems to be much tamer than the 9271-8i that I was looking at.
I’ve been having a lot of problems with the ASRock X570 Pro4 running a 6 disk raidz2.
I’ve crashed it with fio a few times.
Strangely enough, I tried setting up the same 6 disks in a Raid6 with mdadm, and fio can’t get that to crash. If you’re interested I can post some logs from when it crashes on zfs.
I have a 9207-8i with cables ordered as I’m done screwing around with the onboard ports…
Kinda pissed that I paid extra for an 8 port motherboard just to find out it can’t really handle what I need out of it…
Most onboard SATA controllers are garbage unfortunately. The 9211-8i is great and cheap for spinning rust, but if trying to saturate 8 SSDs, you’ll want the 9207-8i to avoid a bottleneck with the raw bandwidth
We have used SATA ports provided by various platform chipsets (X99, X299, X370) for 2 HDD mdadm RAID0 arrays, and we have never had an issue, even under sustained very heavy load.
On the other hand ASmedia SATA controllers caused issues like disks dropping out.
If you can find a Ryzen board where the SATA ports are being supplied by the CPU instead of an AsMedia controller, let me know cuz it’d be an amazing value for FreeNAS