FreeNAS MiniXL AIC QSFP / Thunderbolt

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Dabbler
Joined
Dec 13, 2018
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39
Looking at the specs for the FreeNAS MiniXL I can see the device is equipped with 10G and has one PCIE X4 slot open. Does anyone know of a compatible 25/40G NIC card (QFSP would be fine) or a Thunderbolt 2/3 card that would fit. Everything I am finding seems to require an X8 connector.

I am in the process of ordering one of MiniXL units with all SSDs and would like to be able to get more than 10G throughput if possible.
 
Joined
Jul 2, 2019
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648
Sorry, I don't have an answer. But I do have a question :) What is your use case for needing more that 10GigE? I suspect that even with an all SSD build that there would be other bottlenecks in the MiniXL before you saturate the network - but I could be wrong!
 

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Dabbler
Joined
Dec 13, 2018
Messages
39
This NAS will be used for professional video editing. It will be storing active projects that a video editor is working on and storing previously finished projects that currently exist on lots of external USB HDs. Currently the editor is using Samsung NVME external drives for active editing. This new unit will consolidate everything to one space that can be backed up. The 10G interface will be saturated when copying media to/from the device and hit hard while editing.

My 8 bay nas of just spinning disks in a RaidZ2 easily gets halfway to saturating the 10G interface. I get roughly 600MB/s without any tuning when doing file copies to/from the device. I need to do some more testing with jumbo frames and system tuneables to see if I can push this higher.

With 8 SSDs in RAIDZ2 I should be able to get max sustained writes/reads of 1-3GB/s based on speeds on standard SSDs, not sure which ones exactly they are using in there systems.
 
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