NVME ZFS NAS Build

So I am looking at upgrading to a new NAS for the business. With the low cost on 4tb hynix u.2 drives ($250).

What I want to do is 6-8 PCI-E Gen3 U.2 NVME drives with raid z1.
Any problems or quarks to using the NVME for all the drives still?

Server will have 2 10gbe connections and a few 1gb
3 proxmox servers will backup to it as well as general nas use.

just curious what platform you were going with for the nas build.

Is there any particular issue you’re referring to?

I recall on old versions of ZFS, zpool create would use the raw NVMe devices instead of creating partition tables on them first as it did on SATA and SAS disks. But that was fixed at some point.

just performace problems or bugs with it.

Like hardware wise?

Probably a 2nd gen epyc or something, possible with ryzen I suppose.

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You’ll need at least 40 PCIe lanes to have no bottlenecks (8x4 for the NVMe + 8 for the dual 10GbE).

So you’ll want a socket 2011/2066/3647/4189 Xeon, or a Threadripper/EPYC to take full advantage of the storage.

(edit: For Intel platforms … ) Bear in mind PCIe bifurcation is only officially supported on Xeon SPs using VROC, and even only then using Intel SSDs, so you’ll likely need some PCIe switch cards on a Xeon because there’s no boards with enough slots otherwise.

If you pick a consumer-level board, you’ll get far fewer PCIe lanes at which point the performance advantage of NVMe over SATA is far less.

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Thank you! Its strange that asrock rack x470d4u supports the PCIe bifurcation, at least from my limited understanding but the epyc boards do not.

So at best with ryzen I can do 4 drives and 2 10gbe.

Now next question, 4tb sata drives are more expensive then those older NVME drives. Even if there are bottle necks it should still perform as good or better then SATA ssd right?

Appreciate it!

All AMDs support bifurcation, I mean’t specifically for Intel platforms, sorry if that wasn’t clear.

Yes, assuming cooling is ok :slight_smile:

No you are good!

Here is what I ended up getting.

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What board model is that

Supermicro h11ssl-i

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