I’m looking to build out a NAS running TrueNAS where I’ll have 6 HDD’s, but my motherboard only has 4 SATA ports. I’ve been looking at PCIe to SATA adapters on Amazon, and was curious if there’s anything I should be worried about when buying these? Also would be it be best to buy a PCIe to SATA adapter that will support all 6 drives, or would I be better off running the 4 that I can off the motherboard SATA ports, and only buy an adapter to run the extra 2 drives?
There’s also an option of buying a used board that has 6 SATA ports already on it, and then just selling my motherboard to recoup cost if PCIe to SATA adapters are generally bad. I was already not looking forward to giving up my PCIe slot for the adapter because eventually I wanted to buy a 2.5Gbe nic for it. (This is an ITX board so only 1 PCIe slot - ASUS RoG VII Impact Z97 board)
Also if there are other options feel free to post those. I was just thinking the motherboard has an internal USB 3.1 Gen 1 connector. Now sure if there are adapters to convert those to SATA, but I think USB 3.1 Gen 1 would be fast enough to not bottleneck 2 HDDs.
In general, HBAs are the thing you are looking for. I had the same problem and went with a cheap RAID card but it didn’t went well with ZFS, so my adventures into cheapskate territory ended with that card. Check on Broadcom/LSI for appropriate models. They need to support IT-mode (Initiator/Target, that’s SCSI vocabulary) for ZFS. Rather expensive, but you get a lot of SAS/SATA ports with those HBAs.
In my case I just needed one port for the Hypervisor boot drive and I’m now using an external 2,5" SSD via USB. Works.
In your case, getting a board with more SATA is probably cheapest and safest way to make that NAS fly. There are also boards with 8x SATA which offer room for expansion…you never know what you might need in a couple of years.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the more just getting a different motherboard sounds like the right move. Downside is the only Z97 ITX board I’m finding with more than 4 SATA ports doesn’t offer support for NVME drives like my VII Impact board. I was planning on running an NVME drive for caching. Not the end of the world.
Had I planned this out better, realizing I’d ultimately end up buying a different motherboard, I may have went a generation newer. Would have likely had better luck finding the config I wanted. NVME support was still a bit scarce on ITX board during the Z87/Z97 days.
1-2 NVMe slots are handy. I use 1TB drive for L2ARC and I always recommend NVMe L2ARC especially if you got not that much memory to begin with. But then I have dual 10GBit LAN. With 2.5Gbit networking, SATA SSD will do fine. If you get a cheap 500G or 1T drive and you got the slot for it, it’ll be plenty of L2ARC for ~270MB/s bandwidth and 6x4TB pool size.
The conclusion is, a lot of those Amazon cards use port multipliers (look for stuff like JMB575 in description). Port multipliers are awful for ZFS.
The only consumer adapter I’d personally trust is the SilverStone ECS06, since they clearly state they are only using one PCIe to SATA chip, with no multiplier.
Although you can also look for “LSI 9200-8i IT mode” on ebay, just be sure to 1) buy one which comes with cables 2) make sure it says “IT mode”, “ZFS” or “TrueNAS” somewhere, since they need special firmware to work well with ZFS.
Thanks for the extra info; good to know specifically what to look for if I decided to go beyond 6-drives in the future.
I ended up ordering an ASRock Z97E-ITX motherboard that already had 6 SATA ports onboard. Just figured that would be the easiest route to take, and cheapest since that frees me up to sell off my ASUS RoG Impact VII Z97 board.
NVME support was still a bit scarce on ITX board during the Z87/Z97 days.