hardware question

[David Sheetz]

OK I am trying to use what we have to build a nice FreeNAS server, please tell me any concerns about hardware choices


Dell 710 64 GB ram
LSI 9211 Controller 9211-8I
Quantity 6- 4TB Hitachi Enterprise SAS Drives

One of these SSD’s and
https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Forc...e=UTF8&qid=1500073224&sr=1-9&keywords=M.2+ssd
OR
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MFH0I0S/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?smid=A2UXO5LPTDY3LN&psc=1

This M.2 adapter https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N78XZCH/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[BigDave]

The M.2 adapter card may be fine if you purchase the recommended SSDs listed in the advertisement.
If your plan is to boot from this card, the motherboard will need to be NVMe capable to do that.
I have not researched this...
You might be better off going with an standard 2.5in. SSD and run it off a mobo SATA port.
IMHO an NVMe drive to boot and run FreeNAS is GROSS overkill and a waste of money.

 

[pschatz100]

@BigDave is spot on. The motherboard has PCI 2.0 and will not support either of the m.2 SSD's you have listed. Plan on using a Sata SSD or USB flash drive to boot.

Keep in mind that the old processors do not support the virtualization instructions necessary for some of the newer VM technologies or the Docker Host that will eventually find its way into FreeNAS. However, if this is not part of your plan, then no worries. Personally, I have become a fan of the new iocage jail manager and have little interest in Docker - but YMMV.

FreeBSD, hence FreeNAS, includes drivers for NVM SSD's. I have one configured as a data disk and it works great for this purpose, but I have PCI 3.0 slots. I have never tried to run an NVMe device from a PCI 2.0 slot. However, I can say that, if it did work, you would not get the blazing fast speeds advertised for NVM.

 

[Ericloewe]

if it did work

Of course it does. PCIe is forward and backward compatible.

would not get the blazing fast speeds advertised for NVM.

Half of crazy fast is still much faster than SATA 6Gb/s. By about ~2.7 times. Plus, the NVMe stack is much lower latency than AHCI/SATA and supports higher queue depths and supports several queues and supports more complex devices than (S)ATA or even SAS/SCSI.

 

[Stux]

It's not to bad running a PCIe SSD at PCIe2 speed as it tends to saturate the bus all the time, where as on PCIe3 it would only saturate at times.

Still sucks to leave performance on the table. Unlikely you can boot off your NVMe though.

 

[pschatz100]

Poor wording on my part... I did not mean to imply that it would not boot from an NVMe SSD because of PCIe 2. However, I would be really surprised if the bios on that motherboard supported booting from NVMe devices.

 

[Ericloewe]

Poor wording on my part... I did not mean to imply that it would not boot from an NVMe SSD because of PCIe 2. However, I would be really surprised if the bios on that motherboard supported booting from NVMe devices.

Right, NVMe-aware firmware started showing up fairly recently.

If you really wanted to, you could boot a small UEFI application (from USB) that provides an NVMe driver and allows for an OS to boot from UEFI. Of course, this is far from a trivial scenario.

I feel that motherboards should include some non-volatile storage to be used by boot managers, to sidestep issues like this, remove the ugly EFI partitions from mass storage devices and just generally improve the state of system firmware (most AMI BIOSes can't even get boot orders right!) by transferring some functionality to a cross-platform, vendor-independent software (which already exists, by the way - but it resides in the EFI system partition).
It wouldn't even be expensive - they could just increase the capacity of the system firmware flash chip and format 100MB as the system partition. BIOSes these days use 128Mb parts, so moving to 1024Mb parts would easily allow for this - and the parts are readily available, as they're in use in most highish-end consumer routers.

 

[Stux]

That's even assuming that the PCIe2 mobo is UEFI ;)

Or at least not bug-broken UEFI.

All my PCIe2 mobos don't have functioning UEFI...

 

[Ericloewe]

That's even assuming that the PCIe2 mobo is UEFI ;)

Or at least not bug-broken UEFI.

All my PCIe2 mobos don't have functioning UEFI...

Yes, indeed. My rant is more interesting for the next big thing and for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell boards which didn't get vendor updates for NVMe.

 

[pschatz100]

Yes, indeed. My rant is more interesting for the next big thing and for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell boards which didn't get vendor updates for NVMe.

I'll second that. I purchased a Haswell board for a workstation specifically because I wanted to boot from NVMe - and then discovered that the particular model board did not support booting from NVMe, even though other models from the same manufacturer and with the same chipset are able to boot from NVMe just fine. So much for vendor support.