AMS1166+JMB575 10 port card, OK fine, I will replace it

[allanonmage]

I opted to use TrueNAS Scale for hardware support, that said, I think I found a problem early enough to fix it with my design.

I bought this card with the intent to build my NAS, but apparently it's probably not an HBA and is only good for intermittent use, according to this article. I'm configuring the NAS right now, so the hardware is already put together. I've used the 6 SATA ports on my Gigabyte Aorus Elite x570S, but don't have any more drives at the moment, so the add-on controller isn't doing anything, meaning it's a good time to replace it, since it was probably not a good buy (forum link 1, link 2, link 3, and there are many more). The first guide was written 2 years ago and recommends some enterprise grade take-outs, but doesn't elaborate on them any more than a casual reference. I'm still looking through the docs but haven't come across a post or guide yet. I'm glad there's a lot of posts and articles, but it's a lot to search through.

Are these still recommended pieces of hardware? I read that you need to reflash the firmware on storage controllers, but I wasn't clear if that was a 100% of the time thing, or just sometimes. Is PERC the chip name, the brand name, or the technology name?

The NAS I am building will be for a few users, and so far has 6x 14TB enterprise-grade take-outs, and I was hoping to do 2 drive redundancy, which I think is now called zRAIDz2. Last I fooled around with this was ~2010, and there was not yet a formal name for 2 drive redundancy; everyone was focused on 1 drive of redundancy.

As far as the networking, we'll see how this Realtek 2.5GB card performs before I order an Intel card. BSD's insistence on Intel convinced me to build my desktop with an ASUS board with an Intel 2.5GB chip, and it's a terrible chip, neither ASUS nor Intel are fixing the issue, and I bought a Realtek add on card to resolve the issue. So I'm a little bitter about the iNtEl iS A BeTtEr nIc argument, and it's making me take a lot of the hardware elitism here with some salt and a lot of scrutiny. If I need to swap out the NIC, I might just redesign the whole NAS, so I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

 

[NugentS]

"probably not an HBA" - try definately not an HBA.

Re the Intel vs Realtek issue you have. Yes INtel are better chipsets generally - but on top of that is the simple fact that 2.5Gb is SHIT - its all shit. 2.5Gb is an atrocious standard that should have been taken out back and shot before it got released.

If you want faster than 1Gb, then go 10Gb or better.

Back to HBA's. Look up art of server on Ebay. Yes he is in the US and yes he charges a bit more than the nasty cheap providers on ebay. He does however provide pre-flashed with the correct firmware gear.

For HDD's all you need is an LSI 9200 range - just not a MegaRAID (unless its been lobotomized). You must have IT mode for reliability. If you were using large quantities of SSD's I would suggest a 9300 as its faster - but a LSI 92xx-8i will run 8 HDD's with no issue.

 

[Etorix]

Good diagnostic on the 10-port card.

The recommended piece of hardware are still the same: SAS HBAs based on LSI 2008, 2308 or 3008 chips; the corresponding cards are "9200" and "9300" from LSI itself, or whatever other manufacturers might call them ("PERC" is a Dell brand).

An array with double redundancy is "raidz2". I'm pretty sure this was already a thing in 2010.

As for NICs, Intel is generally good… but 2.5 GbE is universally bad—and the latter trumps the former. Realtek 2.5GbE is not good either. Do yourself a favour and replace it by a server-grade 10 GbE NIC: Solarflare 5122/6122/7122 or Chelsio T520 cards can be found on eBay for less that $50.