JmarcSyd
Dabbler
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2022
- Messages
- 15
Hi all,
I'm fairly new to TrueNAS. I've chosen Scale for my home NAS after trying both prebuilt solutions (Synology) and other open source products.
I purchased a small Dell Inspiron 3250 (core 5i/16GB) SFF as I wanted something small and fairly quiet, and in this respect it's perfect. The only thing that bothered me was the limited storage: there are only two SATA ports on the motherboard that are used by a couple of 1TB 2.5" SSD in RAID1. So I resorted to boot from a small SSD drive on a USB 3.0 port but it's not recommended and pretty ugly.
There are 2 PCI-E ports on the motherboard, one dedicated to GPU cards and not usable for anything else, and one small 1x port. So the challenge was to find a PCI-E 1x card to M.2 SATA SSD, knowing that the PC wouldn't recognize newer NVMe drives.
I started with a card based on the ASMedia ASM1061 chip. It worked at first but then started to return controller errors after a few days. I've read that this chip is supported but in my case it was very buggy. So I had to revert to booting from the USB port.
After further research, I purchased a PH58 card based on the JMB582 chip, plugged my SSD M.2 SATA drive into it and it worked straight away. It's been a week now and no error. Fingers crossed.
Interestingly, this card can support TWO M.2 SATA SSDs (see picture), so potentially I could have mirrored boot drives. I know it's an overkill but I'm tempted to do it.
I just wanted to mention this as it was a bit of a journey to find the right solution. That said, if anyone has had a bad experience with this chip, I'd be interested to know!
I'm fairly new to TrueNAS. I've chosen Scale for my home NAS after trying both prebuilt solutions (Synology) and other open source products.
I purchased a small Dell Inspiron 3250 (core 5i/16GB) SFF as I wanted something small and fairly quiet, and in this respect it's perfect. The only thing that bothered me was the limited storage: there are only two SATA ports on the motherboard that are used by a couple of 1TB 2.5" SSD in RAID1. So I resorted to boot from a small SSD drive on a USB 3.0 port but it's not recommended and pretty ugly.
There are 2 PCI-E ports on the motherboard, one dedicated to GPU cards and not usable for anything else, and one small 1x port. So the challenge was to find a PCI-E 1x card to M.2 SATA SSD, knowing that the PC wouldn't recognize newer NVMe drives.
I started with a card based on the ASMedia ASM1061 chip. It worked at first but then started to return controller errors after a few days. I've read that this chip is supported but in my case it was very buggy. So I had to revert to booting from the USB port.
After further research, I purchased a PH58 card based on the JMB582 chip, plugged my SSD M.2 SATA drive into it and it worked straight away. It's been a week now and no error. Fingers crossed.
Interestingly, this card can support TWO M.2 SATA SSDs (see picture), so potentially I could have mirrored boot drives. I know it's an overkill but I'm tempted to do it.
I just wanted to mention this as it was a bit of a journey to find the right solution. That said, if anyone has had a bad experience with this chip, I'd be interested to know!
