[Solved] Sanity check TrueNAS upgrades - PCIe Gen2 x8 slot

[ro55mo]

So I am slowly upgrading my TrueNAS.

Stage 1 was new PWM fans and extra ECC RAM.

Can I get a sanity check in Stage 2 please? I was thinking of adding a PCIe expansion card for M.2 SATA drives before swapping out the remaining drives.

The heart of the system is the ASRock Rack C2750D4I.

It has the Atom processor bug fix. Manual says PCIe slot is Gen2 x8. It has been running with x6 consumer grade HDDs for years which I got out of bin at work.

I want to go all SSD (Stage 3) for speed, lower power, quieter operation (it is by far the loudest thing in my little computer cave) and just because.

I also want to experiment with using it as a VM host. Probably not running the VMs on it directly but from a hypervisor over software iSCSI.

So one of these M.2 SATA expansion cards should suit. Supports two 2280 length M.2 SATA SSDs.

PCIe 2.0 x8 - Max throughput of up to 4GB/s (or 32Gb/s) right?

Add two of the following drives.

SATA 3.0 each drive max transfer speed is 6Gb/s

So the question is the drives cannot saturate the PCIe interface, correct?

[Airstripone]

@ro55mo

So the question is the drives cannot saturate the PCIe interface, correct?

Correct. In reality with overheads the drives will operate in the ~500MBps range, so you can easily run quad drives and not saturate the PCIE bus. However, check the board layout doesnt have any quirks that mean bandwidth is shared with onboard sata ports or USB, in case you want to use them. I have a lenovo P300 and if I plug in all the sata ports the PCIE slot drops to x1.

[ro55mo]

Thanks for the sanity check.

Thought it was worth updating the post with the information that the carrier card and drives where no problem to install and were detected automatically by TrueNAS with no effort on the users part.