LSI HBA through motherboard chipset?

[Treebear]

Show : See My TrueNAS system

Ryzen 5 1600
Asus Prime A320M-K
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4
3x4TB Western Digital Red Plus NAS
GTX 1050 Ti

I'm running my Truenas Scale system on an Asus Prime A320M-K motherboard with a Ryzen 5 1600 processor. I currently run 3 HDDs and want to grow my pool with 3 more HDDs but I'm limited on SATA ports. I was thinking about upgrading to a motherboard with a second PCIe x16 slot to run an LSI HBA, but I'm notiving my processor only has 20 PCI lanes available. Can I run the HBA through the motherboard chipset? Would that become a bottleneck in drive speed or would it not even saturate that link? Thanks in advance!

 

[samarium]

Why not just use the x16 slot connected to the CPU for the HBA? As a NAS certainly don't need x16 GPU, so could find an x1 GPU, or just move it into another slower slot like the A320 youo arer talking about. As for saturation. you should check the specs and available interconnects of each component, can can then calculate max bandwidth between the components and where the bottlenecks are. Motherboard manuals often have a block diagrad of how things are connected, and even if ASUS doens't for this mobo, often a similar motherboard from say gigabyte will have a diagram that is close enough to help. As for the current motherboard, you can use the shell use sudo lspci -vv | egrep '[^ ]|Lnk(StaCap):' to find the PCIe bandwidths, and lspci -t so see the connection tree. A320 to CPU you will have to look up.

 

[Treebear]

Why not just use the x16 slot connected to the CPU for the HBA? As a NAS certainly don't need x16 GPU, so could find an x1 GPU, or just move it into another slower slot like the A320 youo arer talking about. As for saturation. you should check the specs and available interconnects of each component, can can then calculate max bandwidth between the components and where the bottlenecks are. Motherboard manuals often have a block diagrad of how things are connected, and even if ASUS doens't for this mobo, often a similar motherboard from say gigabyte will have a diagram that is close enough to help. As for the current motherboard, you can use the shell use sudo lspci -vv | egrep '[^ ]|Lnk(StaCap):' to find the PCIe bandwidths, and lspci -t so see the connection tree. A320 to CPU you will have to look up.

I also use the nas as a Plex server, so I want to be able to keep the 1050 for live transcoding.

 

[samarium]

I wonder if the GPU needs x16 for live transcoding, or if a slower/less wide slot would be OK?
Either way, you can explore the PCIe bandwidth of your motherboard/card options.

 

[Treebear]

I wonder if the GPU needs x16 for live transcoding, or if a slower/less wide slot would be OK?
Either way, you can explore the PCIe bandwidth of your motherboard/card options.

I'm thinking I might buy a motherboard that supports my CPU and has two x16 slots that I can run at x8 x8. That should give me plenty of throughput for the HBA and the GPU I would think.