Hardware porn: HPE DL380 G9 + H220 + StarTech 3-Port M.2 SSD Adapter

[vampirebyte]

hello and cheers for this great piece of software!

The forum is full of problems, so we though we could also share a success story: we have repurposed our linux-docker-running-bare-metal development server to a dedicated TrueNAS SCALE machine.

We have read a lot of good explanations here and we bough the missing hardware to make this run smoothly as recommended:

• replaced embedded Smart Array P440ar RAID controller with an OEM H220 HBA card, reflashed with 20.00.07.00 firmware, but keeping the original BIOS
• added extra ECC RAM, bough sealed really cheap from ebay, from 32 GB to 128 GB DDR4 DIMM 2400 MHz
• bought the recommended StarTech 3-Port M.2 SSD (NGFF) Adapter Card - 1 x PCIe (NVMe) M.2, 2 x SATA III M.2 - PCIe 3.0
• bought 2 boot SSDs, cheapest we found on amazon: Kingston A400, 240 GB, mounted on the extension card and plugged into the onboard Controller
• updated the server to the latest firmware for all components and installed TrueNAS from a stick

Server is running very stable for the last few months, no complaints, we just have a few minor inconveniences:

• GUI session timeout, it drives me & my colleagues crazy, hope to be made configurable in NAS-113146 (please VOTE)
• LEDs on the front of the SSDs are not working anymore we discuss it on this topic
• Possibility to deploy custom web containers into the kubernetes cluster from gitlab pipelines: since we are a web development company, we need this into our workflow, not sure if we should start our own chart repo/train for our apps or if the Bluefin release will make things better (loosen the restrictions). What about traefik-proxy + Let's Encrypt? Suggestions?

Thank you for reading this far!
R

 

[jgreco]

bought the recommended StarTech 3-Port M.2 SSD (NGFF) Adapter Card - 1 x PCIe (NVMe) M.2, 2 x SATA III M.2 - PCIe 3.0

Oh cool, where did you see the recommendation? I wrote these up in the forum like 7 years ago but haven't seen many people use them.

Cool hardware: Addonics AD3M2SPX4 M.2 to PCIe converter

I was a bit bothered by the large number of available SATA ports and one or two free PCIe slots in the VM storage server here. With the boost from 64GB to 128GB of RAM, the 256GB M.2 Samsung XP941 with its AHCI interface for L2ARC was feeling a little dated anyways. M.2 offers several...

www.truenas.com

I have found them very useful in specific situations over the years.

 

[vampirebyte]

Yes, I read about it from your post, told you we did our research though in the future we can add a speedy NVMe Samsung PRO as cache or for whatever use-case. We found it on amazon.de.

Only down side is that HPE self diagnosis detects it as Unknown PCI card and the FANs might be a little bit ramped up by this, before it was at minimum 9% all 6 of them, now 4 of them are at 18-20% minimum. Might also be the H220 tho...

 

[jgreco]

Yes, I read about it from your post, told you we did our research

You found that in a seven year old post of mine? Wow, respect. Good research.

Only down side is that HPE self diagnosis detects it as Unknown PCI card and the FANs might be a little bit ramped

No help from me there, sorry. I stopped buying HPE when they started being jerks about the firmware updates.