Cheap 10gb solution?

[xnaron]

I want a 10gb connection from my freenas to a linux server for iscsi VM use. I know I could use two Intel X540-t1 cards with a cat 6a cable to connect them but this is quite expensive.

Can anyone suggest a cheaper solution using older tech found on ebay? Mellanox, Quanta etc. My requirement is that I need it to support current version of freenas, and linux. It also needs to be connectable via a single cable and not requiring any intermediary switching.

thanks

 

[danb35]

2x Chelsio S310-CR and a twinax patch cable. Can be as low as $60 all in.

 

[xnaron]

2x Chelsio S310-CR and a twinax patch cable. Can be as low as $60 all in.

Edit: found this awesome post https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...as-build-with-photos.35694/page-3#post-233955

Thanks very much.

 

[danb35]

That was the thread I was thinking of. I should warn that I have no personal experience (yet) with these products, but I should shortly. And yes, it's actually an S310E-CR--my bad.

 

[xnaron]

I went with chelsio s310e-cr and s320e-cr cards and a cisco twinax passive cable. I finally received the cable today and decided to run a test. I created a virtualbox vm with 2 iscsi targets associated to it for the sata drives. I installed ubuntu 14.04.3 desktop on the vm on the first drive and ran the benchmark on the second drive (results below). My freenas server has 12 seagate 3TB nas drives in a zfs pool with 3 fault tolerant disks. I am not sure if I am pushing the limits of the drives with the benchmark below. I'll have to crunch some numbers.